Hi

I thought it prudent just to write a quick note to apologise for the fact that this blog hasn’t been displaying the pictures within articles for around 24 hours. As you see; this problem has now been resolved: –

The issue was due to a file-permission change on this blog’s Ubuntu Linux server, which occurred for reasons unknown.

The problem is now corrected and, hopefully, will not recur.

I sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Sharron Field

Owner and Creator of kkomp.com
http://kkomp.com

Follow me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/shazzalive

Find me on Friendfeed:
http://friendfeed.com/kkomp

On Facebook too:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/shazzalive?ref=name

This kind of situation can happen a lot; particularly when running Windows XP I’ve noted. It can even get to a point where the entire machine seems to freeze-up, and nothing appears to respond: Not the display, nor any functions. – Yet the processor-monitoring display appears to show that the processor-load never goes above a couple or three percent while this is going on.

There may be a number of reasons why this is happening, and several things that are going on here: -

Screen-requests

Windows XP queues screen requests and executes them one at a time: Therefore if the queue becomes too long you may find that the display may become sluggish at times until the queue of requests have all been processed. During this time the processor’s waiting for the queue to clear and is idling and/or getting on with any other minor processing tasks.

Disk-access

The major reason why the system appears to jam-up is due to disk-access, possibly combined with the above screen-request queuing. You may notice that at the time your computer becomes temporarily unresponsive the hard-disk activity appears to be constant. – That means that queued data is being written to, and other data is being read from, the hard-disk. While this is happening the processor is just twiddling it’s thumbs while waiting.

Disk-access is a well-known bottleneck in computers. While the processor can interact with RAM whilst only having to wait a couple or three cycles for a response, it’s a totally different ball-game when it comes to accessing data on the hard-disk: The processor requests the information and waits. The request quickly gets to the SATA controller, and either joins the queue or is passed straight to the hard-disk. This takes a minute fraction of a second thusfar, as it’s all electronic and happening extremely fast.

When the hard-drive receives the instructions, however, the slow part begins: First the hard-drive’s electronics process the request and instruct the read/write arms to retrieve X data from Y location on Z platter. The read/write arms then have to physically move to do so, and when they find the data they may have to read it a number of times to ensure that the data they send back to the electronics is a 100% perfect copy of what’s stored on the magnetic disk.

In the meantime the processor has been waiting several thousand cycles or more already, and the reply’s not even been despatched yet. After another hundred or so cycles the processor receives the long-awaited reply. – Meanwhile other operations dependant upon the outcome of that request are backing up in the processor queue. – Many of these could be pieces of data that when processed will result in another screen request, upon which the graphics-processor on the graphics card is waiting in order to complete a screen-draw while it holds other pending requests in a queue.

At times this situation can escalate to a point where the request-queue for the hard-disk, as well as every other queue, becomes so long that the entire machine has to wait a while for the multiple-queues to clear and their respective caches to empty, and thus the entire machine becomes temporarily unresponsive for a while. – All because hard-disk access times are so slow compared to other request execution times.

Is there a way to avoid these excessive queues building up?

Not completely, no: But the more RAM that’s installed and the less the number of processes running at the same time, the less frequently this situation will occur. Why?

Each process requires a separate process-thread in the processor. That in itself isn’t a problem with today’s processors, especially multi-cored processors with hyperthreading. – But the processor still has to issue various requests of other components related to each individual process; many of which will be for access to data on the hard-disk, resulting in a queue of a length dependant upon the number of requests for hard-disk data issued. – Therefore the less threads running at once, the smaller the queue.

RAM and 64-bit

Also the more RAM installed the more can be used by the processor to store data in. The more data stored in RAM rather than on disk the quicker the processor can access that data when it needs to refer to it… And at this point I return to one of my favourite subjects: The advantage of a 64-bit operating system over a 32-bit equivalent.

A 32-bit operating system can only see an absolute maximum of 4 gigabytes of RAM. When the system caches and shared-graphics-memory if any have all been taken into account that usually leaves about 3.5MBs – Which isn’t always enough, depending upon how many processes are being run. Eventually the available RAM is all used up and the processor relies upon the paging file on the hard-drive for storage. – The consequence of this is that over time the queues build up and – see above.

A 64-bit operating-system, however, can theoretically see over 3 exabytes of RAM: About a small football-field’s area of 1GB RAM sticks. In reality a 64-bit Windows operating system can see well over 10GBs RAM; and the most RAM that can commonly be installed on today’s motherboards is usually 16GBs anyway. Is that enough RAM to prevent massive queues building up. Normally, yes. (I have a 64-bit Windows 7 box running 8GBs of DDR2 800MHz RAM and it’s never “frozen” even once in 8 months, no matter how many process are being run on it.(Yes I’ve had the beta 64-bit, the RC 64-bit, and now the RTM 64-bit of Windows 7 on it.))

…In short then; the more RAM the better, in which case a 64-bit operating system is going to be superior to a 32-bit operating system in that regard.

Solid-State disks

Also, solid-state disks help one heck of a lot too; as the disk-access-time for SSDs is much quicker than for their spinning-platter equivalents – because there are no moving-parts in SSDs, and therefore the seek-time is vastly reduced.

There is one drawback or more, though, with SSDs at the time of writing: Firstly they cost a small fortune in comparison to spinning-platter disks. The price is coming down, it’s already more than halved, but there is a long way to go yet. Secondly they aren’t available at the same storage capacities as spinning-platter drives: the largest commercially-widely-available SSD drive at time of writing is 320GB, although there are 500GB and larger SSD prototypes in use in secret in the military and in big industry to a lesser extent. (I can’t confirm that as a fact for obvious reasons; but you can believe it or not as you like.)

Do I have to change my operating system to a 64-bit (Windows 7) OS, buy an SSD, and install more RAM to avoid my comp “freezing”?

No; but those three things would be a complete solution.

If you’re running 32-bit XP I would advise an upgrade to 64-bit Windows 7, provided that your machine is 64-bit capable. If you’re running 32-bit XP and intend to continue doing so, then if you have with less than a single gigabyte of RAM installed I’d advise you to add a gigabyte to whatever you currently have installed. If you want to buy and can afford to buy an SSD than go for it if you like; but upgrading to a 64-bit operating system with 4 gigabytes of RAM or more should solve most if not all of your worries. (Personally I’m going to wait until SSD storage becomes much bigger in capacity and also until the price is less than twice the price of standard HDDs before I invest in that technology.)

Do I have to stick to Windows?

Not at all: I do because I’m me, but you can use any operating system you want to use. I don’t advise trying to run Mac OSX on a PC though; unless your name’s Psystar. I’ve tried most operating systems; and I’ve found that Windows works best for me. You’re not me though, and maybe Linux or something might be preferable to you for your needs. – Try a dual-boot of Ubuntu and Windows. Ubuntu’ s free after all – so you have nothing to lose apart from a bit of time.

… So if your computer (running Windows) becomes unresponsive temporarily at some point, you’ll now know why it’s doing so. – Does anyone have anything to add to that? If so please use the comment box below. – It seems a shame to waste it.

In the same way that you should always make backups of your computer’s operating system as is, plus your files; so, in the same way you should back up your WordPress blog.

Backing-up your blog doesn’t mean just keeping a copy of the files that are immediately available via your blog’s FTP server though; those aren’t the only files that you should back-up. Although those files are important, there are other files that are equally if not more important: Those files are the files in your database.

Think of your database as a simile of the Windows Registry: All the files that appear on your blog’s FTP server have corresponding entries in the database, in any one or possibly more of a number of specific tables in the database.

I won’t get too technical here; but I’ll just say that without the correct database a WordPress blog on a Linux server doesn’t work. – So you need to back-up your database as well as your files. How do you do that?

Well there are several ways of doing that; but here’s the one, possibly most unorthodox, way of doing it that I find the easiest by far.

Before I go into backing up your database I thought that I’d have a word about database optimization. – You see everything that is ever a file on your blog itself gets an entry in the database, but if you remove a file from your blog the database entry corresponding to it remains in place. For instance, say that you start writing a post on WordPress itself, and after you’ve written a page you decide that what you’ve written isn’t a good enough standard of writing for publication. You therefore decide that you’re just not in the right frame of mind to do it right now, that you’ll delete the page you saved, and come back to it and start again later on. You delete the page, but its database entry remains. When you start again there’s another database entry, which you save half-way through writing it when you have a coffee-break; and that’s another database-entry. (No;  the saved page, silly, not the coffee-break.   )

So as time goes by, as you can imagine, the database gets cluttered with junk, in the form of entries for saved, revised pages, etc. One page may be saved and revised many times, each creates a database entry, though the only copy you actually want is the latest revision, in most cases. – Therefore you could find that the amount of space that your database takes up on your server’s hard-drive could almost equal the amount of space taken up by the other files eventually, even though most of it is occupied by unwanted junk-entries.

Optimise first

This is where database-optimisation comes into its own. Optimizing your database means clearing out all the unwanted crap that’s making it huge, and only keeping the entries that are needed. In the old days you had to learn MySQL, install and operate phpMyAdmin, etc, to do that. These days the geeks associated with WordPress have built a plugin so that you don’t have to.

The free plugin is called WP-Optimize, not surprisingly, and it does what it says on the tin: It automatically optimises (Yes I spelled it the English way that time.) your WP database. It’s exactly like any other plugin to set up, it goes into the plugins directory inside the WP-content folder, and you activate it via the plugins section of the WordPress user interface. You’ll find the settings configurations for it in the ‘Dashboard’ section.

This plugin will optimise your database so that it doesn’t become too huge; fat with unwanted junk, causing wasted time when you back it up.

- Which brings us back up to the subject of back-up: I’ll now tell you how to back-up your database pretty much totally automatically, with very little interaction, so that there’ll be a copy of the backup of your database files retained on your server, and also you’ll have one handy on your computer too, along with the files you back-up via FTP, should the worst come to the worst.

In a while I’ll tell you what I do to accomplish this: You might like to copy me, or you might like to adapt my method to suit yourself. Whatever is the case, you’ll first have to install another plugin: -

Database back-up

This time the free plugin’s called WP-DB-backup, and it once again avoids you having to learn MySQL and phpMyAdmin by automating the backup of your database.

Install and activate it in the usual way, and set it to back-up all your database tables to your server on a daily schedule. It’ll create a folder in WP-content called ‘Backup-oc879′, if I remember correctly. Inside that folder it’ll deposit a zipped backup of your database as an .sql.gz file on a daily basis as per your settings. You’ll find the settings for this plugin in the ‘Tools’ section of WP.

I’ll mention, at this point, that when your blog starts to get big like mine is, with over 500 posts, the backups are also rather large. – You only need the latest backup (+ the one before that, for ‘luck’.) – So every week I go into that folder and erase all but the last 2 backups, which are around 12MBs in size each in my case, because I find that they take a long time to download, and if there’s less of them, considering I really only want 2 of them, then getting rid of the trash makes a lighter load.

FTP it

OK – So your database now is backed up daily to your server, and you back-up all the files on your server on a daily-basis, manually, via FTP. – That way you’ve backed up everything, including your automatically-backed-up database too. (Unfortunately you will have to install and learn phpMyAdmin if you ever need to restore your database files; but at least you’ll have a backup or more to hand should the need arise.)

I have 9 backups at a time for reference purposes on my computer.

"NINE!?"

Yes, nine: ‘kkomp latest backup #1′, ‘kkomp latest backup #2′, ‘kkomp latest backup #3′… all inside a single folder. Whenever I need to make a new backup, I find the oldest backup and delete everything inside the folder, then I back-up the entire blog including database backup(s) to the empty folder via FTP. – That way, if I do something, try it out, and then decide that it was better the way it was x-days ago, I have a back-up of just that.

Yes, it’s a little extra work, (- And you have no idea how extremely slowly and laboriously each of those backups transfers across a LAN at an average speed of somewhere around 167KB/s. It also takes over an hour to FTP them up from the server too; but I just do something else while that’s going on.) but it’s all part of the job to me. I even copy a backup to another file after renaming it by adding the word ‘old’ to its title once in a while, just for posterity’s sake.

Anyway; that’s how it’s done in my case.

Enjoy the rest of the week.

Buy “WordPress on Crack” – Build your own WordPress plugins: Click Here!

According to figures released by Net Applications on or around 5th November 2009, it would seem that Windows 7 had at that time already taken 3.67% of the operating system market; a 1.68% growth since its launch on 22nd October 2009.Most if not all of the figures released on 22nd October were related to the free release Candidate, but the increasing figures suggest that many users are upgrading their operating systems to Windows 7.

Despite this somewhat explosive growth; it appears also that Windows 7 installations, in the main, are simply replacing older Windows operating systems, rather than capturing market real-estate from competitors. From September to end of October 2009 the Mac’s market-share grew from 5.12% of the market to 5.27%; a rise of 0.15%. Did those users migrate over from Linux or Windows; or are they perhaps using Windows and Mac on separate computers? Maybe they’re new users? It appears that Windows 7 isn’t causing any Mac people to convert at this time.

The overall Windows market share in fact dropped slightly in October. Nevertheless, Windows accounts for 92.52% of the marketing total, according to available figures released on 5th November, compared to 92.77% in September. – It’s growth, then, for both Microsoft and Apple.

That fact could well be due to the timing of Apple’s release of Snow Leopard, as well as the factor of a good pricing policy on their part. The low price of Snow Leopard in comparison to Windows 7 is offset by the high price that Mac users initially paid for their machines; so all in all the cost of running either comes down to a similar figure at the end of the day.

Of course, the figures released by Net Applications quite obviously are more relevant to the USA than globally it would appear, although do correct me if I am wrong. The sales of Macs in America appear to be greater then their global sales figures; so the figures presented herein could paint more of a cloudy picture for Windows 7 than is actually the case.

Whatever the case; it appears that Microsoft have scored  rather well so far with their new operating system. It would be interesting to compare the difference in percentage terms between those Win 7 users who are installing the 64-bit version and those installing the 32-bit version. – I don’t have those figures available currently, but any significant increases in 64-bit usage is sure to increase speed of the heralding-in of the age of 64-bit computing.

Why is this so important? Because although a 64-bit operating system utilises more memory-space for its operation, with an increase in 64-bit computing comes an increase of both operating system and hardware-versatility: Gone is the up-to 4-megabyte memory limitation with 64-bit, and it’ll be a good few years before a motherboard is manufactured that can hold even a single exabyte of RAM. Also advantageous is the fact that 64-bit hardware is far more multi-application-flexible; therefore executing a number of different programs simultaneously puts less strain on the hardware and allows faster operation.

I’ve heard it said amongst certain geeks that standardisation of 64-bit software with regard to a Windows environment will be at least two years in coming: Personally I doubt that, and would estimate that figure to be one year at most. Without the 64-bit-adoption-statistics to hand, however, I can currently only speculate.

What’s your view?

‘Good question that “Yahooligan”: I think it deserves a post all of its own. I was looking at a list of recent visitors to my blog when I saw your Yahoo search enquiry. Don’t worry; I can’t personally identify you: I know you visited but I’ve no idea who you are. ‘Thanks all the same for leaving me a title to write about.

The answer is; in some cases yes, in other cases no. A very rough guide to some sort of an answer would be the question: -

How old is your computer? : -  More than 5 years old = Probably not. (1)

                                                          Less than 5 years old  = Maybe. (2)

                                                          Less than 3 years old  = Probably. (3)

That gives us some idea; but it has no more than a 75% chance of being the right answer, and even the 3 answers aren’t definite.

What I can say with a good degree of accuracy is that even if it’s possible to run Win 7 64-bit on a computer older than 5 years; it’s not really worth all of the hassle. Why not? Because at that age, hardware is getting past it, and it’s probably not going to see another 2 years in a good working condition. It might; but the odds are stacked against it doing so. – So if your old XP machine is that old then it’s best to consider buying new with Windows 7 pre-installed, or building a box and installing Win 7 on it.

If it’s less than 5 years old then what you really need to know is: Does it have a 64-bit-capable motherboard? – And does it have a 64-bit capable processor? If the answer is yes to both questions, then you can give installing Win 7 64-bit a try. If no to one or both questions then you’ll need to replace the motherboard, RAM, and processor, before you can install anything 64-bit. – That’s basically almost a total rebuild. Is it worth doing? You decide: It’s your box after all. The cost of doing so? If you’re lucky you can just do it for just under £100UKP using a cheap or secondhand dual-cored processor on a new motherboard; Intel Socket 775 or AMD Socket AM2.

How do you find out whether your processor and motherboard are 64-bit capable? You find the manufacturer’s mark and model number on both the mobo and CPU, (Look in Device Manager.) then you type them into the Google search-bar. (Google is your friend.) Read all the data you collect from the best links and see if there is any reference to them being 64-bit capable. If so in the case of both mobo and processor, then you’re in luck. If not; it’s time to buy/build a new computer.

If your computer is less than 3 years old then it would be safe to assume that it probably is 64-bit capable. Try installing a 64-bit operating system on it. If you haven’t bought your Windows 7 discs yet and don’t want to until you know for sure, try downloading a free 64-bit Ubuntu Linux distro from the internet, burning the ISO to disc, and dual-booting that with your existing OS, or test your box with a run of Linux 64-bit from the disc. If you find that you like Linux better than Windows then use Linux instead; it’s free after all. If you prefer Windows still then you can always uninstall Linux at any point in time.

If your old machine is older than 5 years old, it may just be possible to install Windows 7 32-bit. – In fact I know of someone who actually installed the 32-bit version on a non-upgraded computer of age 6 years and it ran with basic desktop selected. – So all may not be lost; although once again I do encourage people with computers that old to buy or build a new box to run 7 on, plus, of course, to run the 64-bit version on their new hardware.

I think that’s about all there is to say. – ‘Anybody else got anything they’d like to add to that?

I have been running Windows 7 64-bit RC since May on my other box. On the one I’m typing this on I’m running XP Professional 32-bit. Both boxes are capable of running Windows 7 64-bit and have multi-cored processors. – But I’m going to keep XP on this one for now; possibly right up to 2014 if the box lasts that long. – It should do as I built it, and the only ones I’ve ever had faults with that I built were a couple with a Shuttle mobo with a weak processor socket surround: Basically the AM2 cooler tensioniser lugs snapped off, and the cooler fell off the processor causing the machine to shut down when the CPU’s thermal trip activated. I RTM’d them and rebuilt. Also an AsRock mobo’s chipset died right in front of me as I booted up… This is going well off topic already.

There is a reason why I’m keeping XP for so long; which I’ll share with you further down.

For the time being; let’s take a look at Windows 7: -

When Windows 7 was subjected to benchmarking tests; the Office benchmark took more than 70% longer to complete with 7 than in Vista.

In the 2D multi-application test, this had a knock-on effect on the overall score. – Otherwise Windows 7 did prove faster than Vista – by around 2%. How, then, bearing that in mind, does this constitute a proper performance increase over Vista?

Windows Display Driver Model 1.1 is a new device in Windows 7 which allows multiple applications attempting to access screen-memory to draw and update their graphics at the same time. With the the 1.0 version in Vista only a single process could draw to the screen at any point in time, which was one of the reasons that Vista’s interface could sometimes seem uncooperative and sluggish.

Applications can update their windows as soon as you press a button in Windows 7,  Hence the system therefore appears to be much faster, while actual benchmarked performance is similar.

“But that doesn’t explain anything.”

In short, it’s all down to WDDM 1.1. : In Vista, display elements were stored in graphics RAM and system RAM at the same time. – Yet another waste of resources.

In Windows 7 with  WDDM 1.1 the data sets are stored in graphics RAM only. Therefore whilst this leaves more system memory free for applications, the down-side of it means that if the OS wants to draw graphics without going via the GPU, various data sets must be copied from video RAM to system RAM and back; thus wasting time.

This is the main downfall of Windows 7’s 2D performance in an office environment is actually worse than Vista’s, which we already know is slower than XP’s in that area. – Do you see where I’m going with this?

Everything else about Windows 7 is better, snappier, better laid-out and more functional with increased practicality. You’ll benefit from increased battery-life with 7 on your laptop or netbook. Yes even a netbook with 1GB RAM and a 1.6GHz Atom processor can run 7: It’s no gaming rig; but it does the business, and resuming from standby or hibernate is no longer a lottery as to whether it will actually start properly again when you do.

On your desktop, if you use 3D apps, games, memory-intensive processes, whatever, you’ll notice benefits immediately.. Office work, however, which I do a lot of on this particular box, pretty much to the exclusion of all else besides watching a video now and again, appears to have no benefits from 7, in fact quite the reverse by all accounts. – Which is way I’m keeping XP on this one.

What happens in 2014 when XPs extended product-lifecycle runs out? – Well if my calculations are correct we’re due another new OS around that time; so wait and see. I doubt this box will last that long in all honesty, talking from reality’s perspective: It’s in use one hell of a lot. – But even if it makes it to then; I’ll probably retire it on Linux, and build new for the next OS after 7.

Conclusion

So back to the question: Should I upgrade: –

Yes if possible; because Windows 7 has more snappiness and functionality than Vista or XP: It feels as if it’s working for and with you rather than begrudgingly for you as with XP, or against you as with Vista.

- But for your office computer; well there’s no rush. – Let’s leave it at that.

One thing for sure is that Microsoft have saved themselves from the looming pit of oblivion this time round.

Are you intending to upgrade to Windows 7? What machine do you have, and what is your current operating system?

Oh, and, when you upgrade, try to upgrade to the 64-bit version: There is just so much more to 64-bit computing – It really is “Life without walls”; such as not being restricted to 4GB RAM maximum for starters…

AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface. Advanced Host Controller Interface was designed purposefully with SATA hard-discs in mind: The Advanced Host Controller Interface standard allows SATA discs to fully utilise their advanced features; such as hot-swapping and native command queuing.

I have no information about this subject with regard to Linux operating systems, and the same goes for a Mac and OS X, so I’ll stick with Windows only for now. Perhaps a Linux guru and/or a Mac user in the know would comment and fill me in on the blanks I’ve just outlined?

STOP PRESS: In fact, newer mainstream Linux kernels support AHCI natively… See here.

Staying with Windows… AHCI can be activated in the BIOS screen of newer motherboards by changing the SATA ports’ mode from ATA to AHCI; but this action alone may well cause your Windows installation to produce a BSOD on boot. – Simply changing the mode in the BIOS with a Windows operating system already installed on the hard-drive is that the correct storage driver isn’t installed – therefore the existing ATA driver is looking for ATA and finds AHCI; can’t make any sense of it, and crashes Windows.

The way to put this right is to set the BIOS for AHCI (Only if you’re using at least 1 relatively modern SATA drive, of course: The setting will have no effect on their PATA counterparts, as those use a totally separate controller.) and do a repair install, AKA maintenance reinstall, of Windows.

This will cause Windows to set itself up again, this time with the correct drivers. You won’t be able to simply switch back from AHCI to ATA again without performing the repair installation again.

This operation will work with Windows Vista, SP1, 2. It shouldn’t cause any problems in Windows 7 either. With Windows XP I’m not sure, as my sources of information on this subject appear to indicate that it will work in XP SP2 onwards, but possibly only with the inclusion of a vendor-specific driver. It’s probably best to leave the BIOS on a computer with an existing Windows XP installation set to ATA, unless you have a lot of time to experiment. It is possible that it’ll work in XP: Maybe; maybe not – ? Again I’d ask for expert comment on this.

“Windows Vista natively supports both AHCI and NCQ. FreeBSD fully supports AHCI and NCQ since version 8.0.” – Wikipedia.

This last week has been fraught with server problems; resulting in a certain amount of downtime. I apologise for the downtime, and i trust that it wasn’t too inconvenient to you.

The server problems appear to have been caused, in the light of an engineer’s report, as well as in the light of my personal analysis, by an “unable to allocate memory” error on the server, caused by a combination of heavy traffic, including spiders, spammers, and hackers trying to exploit patched weaknesses in WordPress, with a heavy server loading due to plugins causing conflict with one another – as well as the overall complexity of the blog structure.

In remedy of this issue, I have removed or deactivated a number of plugins, and have asked engineers at my web-host to upgrade the server. These remedial actions should negate any future downtime for the time being at least, and hopefully also for some time into the future also.

It has been a rather worrying time for me, having just moved the blog over to a new, dedicated, server. Clearly I didn’t take into account all of the factors during the initial setup, and therefore the server setup was insubstantial for the load put upon it.

I’m writing this post at a time before the hardware upgrade has taken place; but you will note from the Service Announcement posted earlier on this blog that the work has been scheduled and should have been completed by the time you read this post.

On another front; you may have noticed that I have started to produce reviews of certain hardware components: -

Gigabyte GA-M720-US3; A Budget-Board +

Intel Core i7 920: The Premium of Hi-Performance Processors

and

Gigabyte P55M-UD4: Another Gigabyte Mobo Without Graphics Capability

Although this is more like a test-sample of such posts at this time; I will be observing the reader statistics to see, in short, whether these posts are a hit or a miss. If they prove popular than I shall produce more posts of this type. – So if you like what you see then do click on more posts of that type, and do also comment on them. (That’s what that box below them from Disqus is all about.)

There have been a couple of guest-posts since the last Public Newsletter: The last one was by 16-year-old Kyle Potts from America. This budding Linux guru gave a few reasons why certain types of people should use Linux. He also explained that many of us use Linux-based apps without even realising it too: -

Linux For Everyone?

In the other guest-post, Misca Nicoleta from Romania explains how installing Windows 7 in your portable device can extend battery life: -

Install Windows 7 on your Portable Device and Increase Battery Life

(It’s September 17th; yet I’ve just heard someone letting off the first firework of the year outside! Why don’t they just start Valentine’s Day on 5th January, after the 12 days of Christmas are up, then start Easter on the 15th February, immediately following which comes the long haul to Father’s Day, followed by the same for Mother’s Day, then combine the preparations for Halloween and Bonfire Night immediately after that, and on 6th November start Christmas?.. Actually that’s almost happening already: People must have such small lives these days!

What am I on about? – Think about it: An entire year to prepare for 8 or so days at their risk of financial ruin every time; repeatedly until death do us part. That amounts to an actual “life”, not including preparation for “life”, of around 640 days, consisting of nothing but avoiding total bankruptcy. – That sucks!

- Oh; I forgot to include the person’s birthday too: ‘Add another 60 to 80-odd days then. – It still sucks!)

- OK back to topic; and I’ve also included a few more delectable morsels for your edification since the last Public Newsletter: -

It’s Probably Not My blog… – Speaks, again, to you myriad of people who are still using IE6 out there, and getting a less-than-perfect browsing experience as a result. IE6 is old hat; and using it can, in a way, be likened running your car on square wheels.

Hard-Drives Are Unreliable – Fact Warns you to be prepared for one of the worst computing disasters happening at any point in time: That being your hard-drive packing up.

Hold a Micro-Party and get a Free Copy of Windows 7 Ultimate – What’s this? An extra day to add to the “700-day-“life””, perhaps?

How to Install WordPress on Your Domain

and

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer : Free WordPress Plugin Are a couple of WordPress-related articles that are fairly well explained by their titles.

…And finally there are the articles related to kkomp.com’s recent short-lived outages: -

Kkomp.com is Under Attack

and

**Kkomp.com Service Announcement**

- I think that just about covers everything.,, Oh and there’s also…

64-Bit – NOW 

– Please let’s bury 32-bit computing in its grave once and for all, as soon as is practically possible. – It’s too limiting and older than IE6!

OK I’m fed up with writing right now: I need a coffee + Also I want to get this post queued on the server before the planned outage where my server is upgraded. Also I need a cigarette: -

Enjoy the weekend; whatever you’re doing.

Questions: Should I use Linux? What is Linux? Is Linux for me?

If you’re a bit more than the average computer user, ‘chances are you have at least flirted with the idea of using Linux.

Linux, to me, is more than just an operating system: it’s a tool to helping you understand the true power of your computer.

Most of the people reading this article are probably running Windows; whether that be 98, NT, ME, XP, Vista, or 7. Windows has been around for a while, and the cries of it’s users just as long. Even with the problems associated with Windows, people still tend to stick with it. I am not sure if this is just because they don’t know that there is a perfectly good alternative out there, or if they do know there is an alternative out there, but don’t want to change because they are dependent on Windows applications.

Either way they still aren’t running Linux. I am not saying they every person running Windows should run to Linux. – That certainly isn’t true. In fact I still have Windows Vista on another hard drive on my computer just so as I can run applications that run in Windows, but won’t run in Linux.

What I’m saying here is that there are certain people who could easily move to Linux and people who can’t. Here is a small list of people who I think can and can’t move to Linux:

The Student

The student could easily move to Linux. As long as they do not have Windows-only applications that the school demands they run. They could type off their reports with OpenOffice, browse the web with Firefox or Chrome, IM friends with pidgin, and listen to their music with Songbird.

The Artist

The graphic artist will probably have the hardest time converting to Linux. That’s because industry standard programs such as Photoshop, and Illustrator are not supported in Linux. There are open source programs but they do not compare to the big guys. For example gimp is nowhere near as good as Photoshop, so unfortunately the graphics artist will be stuck in Windows or Mac land for a while longer.

The "Grandma type"

We all have heard of these people, the ones who have no clue how to use a computer, but still want to.

I think that Linux is almost perfect for them. (Some may disagree though, for Linux can be complicated.)

If you set them up with a web browser and a word processor; then they will have all that they need. – You may have to set up their wireless once, and their printer. – After that, though, they are set up and raring to go.

Also you don’t need to worry about them calling you up one night saying that they download a video and got a virus since Linux is almost virus free. [Sharron disagrees.] – So, for the "Grandma type", Linux can definitely work for them.

- These are only a few groups of people that Linux does and does not work for. There are plenty more people that Linux will be perfect for, and probably even more that Linux would be bad for. – It all comes down to choice: If you want full control of your computer with a little frustration, and lots of open-source applications then go Linux. If you want moderate control of your computer, with tons of good and major supported applications then go Windows… Or get the best of both worlds and dual boot.

Of course there are plenty of applications that people use that are not  Linux operating systems, but more utilities. – Such as Gparted (A bootable Partition editor.), Clonezilla (A great backup programs with clones your hard drive.), System Rescue CD ( A general purpose rescue CD). These are only a few of the applications that people use, that are really Linux underneath.

- So to the question: Can anyone use Linux? The answer is, in a way, yes!

Personally I’ve been using WordPress since June 2008. Many other bloggers have been using it a lot longer than that. Since I started using WordPress the initial process for getting it onto your server, setting it up, and getting started, has remained the virtually same: -

Getting ready

First you’ll need to download the latest version of WordPress in the form of a zip file. Following that you’ll need to unzip it, using a program such as WinZip, which is built into Windows from XP onwards. The folder that WinZip creates will contain all of the necessary files and folders for WordPress which you just unzipped from the zip file.

The next part of the mission is to transfer all of those files and folders to a directory on your server. Your server will need to be php-enabled, and should be running MySQL or equivalent in order that you can create a database. I recommend a Linux server for running WordPress: Red Hat Linux is a good choice, although I am currently running this blog in Ubuntu. The main thing is that Linux is better than Windows all round if running WordPress. Linux is generally a better platform for servers in the first place; despite my continued use of Windows on my computer terminals. This doesn’t cause any conflict, and a Linux dedicated server can easily be controlled and operated from a Windows computer.

If you’re intending to set up your blog on a shared-platform server; where a number of other domains share the server with yours; ensure that your domain will not at any point in the future hog the shared resources of the server. – Your hosting company may get funny if it does this. Here I cite a number of instances where this blog was on a shared Red-Hat Linux platform in the past, and, due to its high resource usage, the hosts placed the domain on a backroom scripting server with other domains that also overused their share of server resources; causing this blog to become very slow indeed, to the point of totally unresponsive to web requests. The third time this happened I moved to a dedicated server, where I also placed my other, inactive, domains for the time being. (Except for kustomkomputa.co.uk and it-blo.ws; both of which are still on shared platforms, and one of which is still totally inactive.)

If you’re intending to create a professional blog then it would be best to place all those files and folders in the root directory. That doesn’t mean your server’s root directory, it means the root directory of your web space itself: The root directory available to you to upload files and folders to. Whether or not you already have subdirectories in the root folder, it’s always a better idea to install WordPress as low in the directory structure as is possible and reasonably practical.

The way to transfer the unzipped files and folders is via an FTP client to your FTP server section. Your web-host should have given you the login details, or in many cases you are able to create at least a password for yourself. I use FileZilla as my FTP client on my computer; but there are many other FTP clients out there; some are free and some are charged-for. Consult the program’s documentation or Read Me file for usage instructions of whichever client you choose to use. Upload the WordPress files and folders to the root directory of your web space.

Now we come to the setting-up of WordPress. – But first you’ll need to set up a database. Most shared-platform hosting packages come with an included database space, and you can create a database easily on a dedicated server using either MySQL or whatever tools your hosting providers make available to you. Remember the name and password of your database: Write them down; you’ll need them in the following section. You’ll also need the “hostname” of your database, so write down the IP address of your database, which you can use for this purpose.

Setting-up WordPress on your server.

If you look in the root-directory of your web space, you’ll see a file called “wp-config-sample.php” This php file has to be configured in order for WordPress to work. If you download and open the file on your own computer, it’ll look something like the example below. I’ve highlighted the bits that you need to worry about in bold type. I’ve filled in the values between the ‘ ‘ marks with examples for you. The piece in dark-blue doesn’t have to be changed, but it’ll improve the security of your blog if you do change the values where it says ‘put your unique phrase here’. – Anything will do: ‘Andy-Pandy’, ‘1234567890’, ‘eat sh*t and die’, or even ‘strjsdagohjvr5[0gte#’, whatever you like.

The entry for DB_HOST is set by default to “localhost”. This will work as is 9/10 times; but I’ve known it not to, so it’s always best to put your database’s IP address between the ‘ ‘ marks here, just to err on the side of caution. Nothing else other than the values as mentioned above need be changed.

If you want your blog in a language other than English, you’ll need to set up the line define (‘WPLANG’, ”); correctly, plus install the correct corresponding MO file for the chosen language, as per the instructions.

Finally; rename the file to wp-config.php and upload the altered file to the root web space with all the other files and folders. You can now delete the original file named wp-config-sample.php if you like, as WordPress doesn’t need it.

Finally

You’re ready to go. Open your web-browser and type your domain name followed by /wp-admin , like this: –

http://www.mydomain.com/wp-admin

WordPress will set itself up and present you with the login page. WordPress will have generated a long complex password, which it’s best to write down just in case. Log in to WordPress by pressing the Login button. The WordPress dashboard GUI will appear. 

– And that’s it: You now have a working WordPress installation. I suggest that you go into your profile and change that password to something you can remember that’s more familiar to you; but keep hold of the old password for a while just to be on the safe side.

That’s pretty much it. – Happy blogging.

Comments are invited. – Please retweet this post. Thanks.

I’ve just read an article written by an author who is currently running 32-bit versions of Windows on hardware that is capable of running 64-bit versions. He says that his major concern is about compatibility were he to go 64-bit when he installs Windows 7, although he would find the vast amount of RAM that he could use most useful. He’d nevertheless, until recently, been planning to stick to 32-bit because one of his most-used applications didn’t have a 64-bit version available. This situation has recently changed; and therefore he is now considering running 64-bit Windows 7, although still with some trepidation as far as hardware compatibility is concerned:

To quote: “Hardware vendors need to update their drivers for 64 bits, and some have not. Hopefully, more and more will over time, but it’s the most likely area of concern, particularly for older machines. Hardware vendors will of course focus their efforts on newer hardware and are less likely to provide updated drivers for their older equipment.”

That is to my mind a defeatist attitude: It’s saying that since hardware vendors can’t be bothered to update their drivers for their hardware; we have to stick to a 32-bit operating system, with its memory limitations, and put up with it, because it makes things easier for existing market forces.

I think that’s totally the wrong way to look at it:

If we’d have said “OK; we’ll stick with 32-bit single-core processors because it’s easier on Intel and AMD,” then we’d still all have slow computers, incapable of running multiple programs efficiently, with less than 4 gigabytes of memory, to this day. The gaming industry’s innovations would have been snubbed, and people would be getting fed up with computers by now due to technological stagnation and blockage.

- So why, then, should we say die on moving to 64-bit just because the hardware manufacturers and vendors can’t be arsed to write 64-bit drivers for their products? IF, rather than lying down and accepting it, we refused to buy any piece of hardware that didn’t have a 64-bit driver accompanying it; and I’m talking about secondhand as well as new here, then the hand of manufacturers and vendors would be forced into action; and they’d have no choice but to provide 64-bit drivers with their products.

The same goes for programs: If everyone who owns a computer capable of running a 64-bit operating system did so; and those whose computers were incapable of doing so bought or built new machines capable of doing so and did so, then 32-bit would be no more: This would make all 32-bit drivers, and, to a large extent, 32-bit programs also, virtually worthless to anybody: Therefore industry would start turning out all 64-bit application software and all-64-bit drivers for hardware. 64-bit Windows is backwards-compatible with 32-bit applications; so where there is no choice but to use a 32-bit program or driver, it could be done in secret, while at the same time rallying and hassling manufacturers and vendors to hurry up with their new 64-bit drivers.

- Remember; under this plan, nobody would buy any hardware that didn’t have a 64-bit driver available. Existing hardware, however, would continue to be used in 32-bit-mode if at all possible until a compatible 64-bit driver was released. – So unless a device was sold with a 64-bit driver; the manufacturer or vendor wouldn’t get a sale at all. If something was so old that it just wasn’t worth writing a 64-bit driver for it, then with the low-price of hardware these days it wouldn’t hurt the owner to recycle the old unit(s), or donate them to a museum, and upgrade their hardware to something newer.

I realise that this plan would hit secondhand hardware traders such as eBay and the like rather hard in a number of departments. I realise that it would also hit a number of users too; and force them to dump old but working hardware and spend a little cash to buy new; but isn’t it worth a little sacrifice in the name of progress?

Here I’m going to do something unusual for a Wintard and praise the Mac: Macs are all 64-bit. The Mac OS and all the related software are 64-bit, as are pretty much all the new Linux distros which are being produced these days. Windows is probably the only operating system which is encouraging hanging on to 32-bit. That is not acceptable; especially in the light of the fact that Windows has the largest market share, and should be leading the progression; rather than dragging behind.

But that’s the way things are: Microsoft; for reasons best known to themselves, have always been a little slow on the uptake recently. Perhaps if they did but realise that they’ll never be able to keep up with the running pack if they keep shooting themselves on the foot; they’d be able to be the true market leaders that they should be.

-For example: They do what they should have done ages ago finally and ask their customers what they’d like in the next operating system. (It took Vista to teach them that; and as a result they probably lost billions of potential dollars in revenue as a result.) When it comes to pricing it however, they use the same type of system that they used with Vista; various “versions” with x number of features disabled in proportion to the level of cost. That is a stupid marketing strategy; and I’ll explain why:-

All the various versions are sold on an almost identical disc. That disc contains a full-featured Windows installation of Ultimate edition; regardless of which “version” it is. The only difference between the Ultimate disc and any other is the number of features disabled: It costs them exactly the same to produce the most disabled version as it does to produce the Ultimate version. By disabling certain features they’re cutting the sale value of the product.

If, instead of doing as they are, charging $300 for the ultimate version, and say, $75 for the most-disabled version, they instead sold nothing but Ultimate and charged $188 for it; then they’d make exactly the same sales revenue, yet not have to spend a bit extra to produce discs with features disabled.

If my information is correct they’re packing both a 32-bit and a 64-bit version of 7 into a single DVD case also. – Again this is counterproductive: If they sold nothing but 64-bit Ultimate for $188 they’d cut their production costs dramatically. – PLUS anyone who is still running a 32-bit processor/motherboard setup wishing to run 7 would have to get a new setup or upgrade their existing system by necessity: Think of all the benefits to hardware manufacturers plus the extra number of sales of preinstalled Windows 7 installations!

- But Microsoft aren’t that good at thinking ahead, as can be seen here.

“Wait a minute…” You interject. “Not every computer is capable of running Windows 7 Ultimate: What about netbooks, for example?”

You would be mightily surprised: Rich Menga of PC Mech.com recently installed Windows 7 Ultimate RC (32-bit) on his Dell Inspiron mini 10v. I can’t link to the article really, as it’s in the PC Mech Premium section, so it’s not free to view. (What I will say; however, is that it is well worth joining PC Mech Premium. I won’t advertise too heavily here; but that is a fact.) I’ll give away a couple of tiny snippets of information from the article, and I do hope the guys at PC Mech won’t be too annoyed by my doing so: -

“Problems encountered[:]

None.”

- No word of a lie: That is directly copied & pasted from the article. – As is the following:

“System Performance[:]

Shockingly good. You’d think with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom mobile processor and 1GB of RAM with a 5400rpm hard drive that Windows 7 would run as slow as molasses. Not true. In fact it runs about the same speed XP did. In some instances even faster.”

- I don’t see any problems there, do you? These “versions” appear unnecessary; they’re just marketing hype. – A load of BS with the intention of making more money? Probably; but despite the intention, it doesn’t appear to be working. Agreed that some comps won’t be able to run certain features perhaps. – Even in the light of the above. There’s a simple enough solution to that: If your computer can’t run something then don’t try to run it. – Easy, isn’t it?

Microsoft must be a centipede or a millipede; as it still manages to stay upright despite repeatedly shooting itself in the foot.

- So a draconian plan has been hatched to kick-off the 64-bit revolution. ‘Too radical? Well it needs to be; or Microsoft will have us lagging back in the 20th Century for the rest of this century.

Backwards-compatibility is never a bad thing: In fact it’s probably one of Microsoft’s leading qualities. – But backward-thinking and everything associated with it is something that technology could well do without.

What are your thoughts on all this?

Welcome to Part Two of this series.

In Part One we looked at the situation that I was facing, having moved to a dedicated server from a shared-platform server. Being a noob as far as Linux is concerned, I followed leads from other people who were more experienced in using Linux, (Although one of them did in fact confess that, although he used Linux more than anything else at work, his main area of proficiency was, in fact, Windows.) which ended in a dead end.

Not to be outdone I eventually discovered a blog post from February 2008 which appeared to contain part of an interesting line of php that turned out to be the answer to my problem.

In Part Two, which you’re reading now, we’re going to look at that line of php, as well as add it to our respective blogs to prevent unnecessary 404 errors.

First, though, from my experience, although somewhat limited, I suggest that only bloggers who are hosted on a dedicated server use this code: I don’t see why it would be necessary to run on a shared-platform server. If you are on a shared-platform; that is sharing a server at your hosting company’s depot with others unknown, then your web-host’s engineers will normally be tending to the server and keeping it problem-free. (Which, in my case, is why it costs more to host 4 individual websites on separate domains on shared-platform servers than it does to host those 4 domains on a  single dedicated server: Because the engineers will only fix hardware faults and occasionally give limited advice on dedicated servers.) If you get unexpected 404s on a shared-platform server, phone customer support and they’ll ask the engineers to put it right. – Only use this code if you have no other alternative.

Note 1: – Which brings me on to thinking: There must be some setting somewhere in the server which will prevent the 404 issue from occurring. The engineers can sort it on shared-platform servers; so why can’t I on a dedicated server?

The answer to that is; a) I’m a technician. – Engineers are much better trained and have a wealth of experience. b) I’m a trained electronics technician, rather than a trained computer technician. c) Er, read on: You’ll see that I have sorted it out; but not in the server settings (Linux) themselves; rather, on a third-party application, namely WordPress, that is on the server, using php.

OK; so first, as promised, I’ll reveal where I found this code and give credit: The site is called “The Moonlight Blog”.  I’ve linked the name to the relevant page.

As you’ll see, the writer gives this information: -

Note the php. When rebuilt by myself it looks like: -

<?php header("Status: 200 OK");
?>

Yes I did say a single line of php; well it sort of is; it just works if it’s typed like that; so that’s how I’m presenting it.

“That was the fruit of a week’s work?” you ask; bemused.

In itself that was the fruit of a few minutes work; it just took me a week to find it, as well as many other things besides.

Note 2: In Part One I stated that the author’s php notation was incomplete; that’s true and then again not true: You see if you’re working with php all the time you know what goes where, and you come to expect a pattern. – so much so in fact that you only need write the information that’s not obvious to the trained eye.

header(“Status: 200 OK”); is the bit that the developer needs. The developer knows that it’s php because the semi-colon shows that it’s the end of the statement. The machine won’t know that it’s php because the machine hasn’t been told that it’s php. The bit that I added tells the machine that it’s php; otherwise, to the experienced developer, it’s simply not required.

OK so we have our line of php code; written so that the machine can understand it.

Where do I put it?

Well; since it’s an instruction for the header of a page to return a html 200 code when executed; it appears logical to put it in the header.php file in the theme folder; located at ~\wp-content\themes\<name of your theme>\header.php. if you have more than one header folder; for example: page_header.php and post_header.php, put it in all of the header files.

Where exactly do I put it in the header.php file(s)?

Right at the very top; above all the other text. Why? Because it works.

How do I add it to my header.php file?

There are 2 ways to do this: The first is possibly the easiest, and is from inside the WordPress GUI itself: -

(This method will only add it to the currently active theme installed on your WordPress installation.)

Click on the arrow on the Appearance tab and click on Editor. On the page that follows, look on the right-hand-side of the screen and click on Header (header.php).

In the text editor in the centre of the screen, type or copy & paste the php from this article above all the other text. You might have to click at the start of the first line and press return to create a clear line at the very top before you insert it.

Below the text editor window you’ll see a blue button with white writing on it “Update File”. Click it and wait for the function to execute. – That’s it.

The other way of doing it is to open up your FTP client and navigate to the wp-content folder on your server. On an Ubuntu server the path could look something like

/home/default/yourdomain/user/htdocs/wp-content

(Various servers/hosting companies may vary.)

Inside that folder you’ll find a folder called “plugins”. Open that and you’ll see a folder with the name of your current theme. Open that folder and download the header.php file to your local computer.

Use a text editor program to open the file and insert the php from this article at the very top of all the other text. Close and save. Use your ftp client to overwrite the existing header.php file on your server with the edited file. Do the same with any other themes you may have loaded as you wish.

-It’s as easy as that: The word “easy” depending upon your previous experience.

Just to recap: We’ve added some additional php to our header.php file in our header.php file in our WordPress blog to instruct the page headers to return a html 200 – OK when executed. This should stop them returning a html 404- not found error. The server then has no choice but to execute the other php on the page in question  and serve the product of that execution to the requesting machine.

- And that’s about all there is to say. This php did the trick for me. Why not let me and all my readers know whether or not it did the trick for you too? Leave a comment. Leave a comment also if you have anything further to add. I’m not a php expert, whereas you might be though; so do feel free to add something.

That’s all.

- And now; some adverts: -

…You see until very recently I’ve been running this blog on a shared-platform Red Hat Linux server which was maintained by the host’s engineers, and I had no such problems. Having been forced to switch to a dedicated server due to resource issues on the shared-platform server- Meaning that this blog was using over 50% of the RAM, and, at times, up to 50% of the CPU resources. – I am now told that it’s up to me solely to perform any software maintenance, and that if I need the assistance of the host’s (Fasthosts.co.uk) engineers, it’ll cost me £60.00 + VAT (Currently £ £69.00) per half-hour; chargeable by the half-hour.

Well I certainly am not paying that! £60 including VAT per hour is reasonable; but what they’re asking is extortionate: Basically they want £69 to spend 5 minutes or less editing a few lines of code. – And to my mind that’s a con: I’m not Microsoft or Sun Microsystems or something, and I can’t budget for that amount at this point in time.

The only answer , then, is to fix it myself. I have two tools to do this with currently: those being the host’s remote console; which breaks down in some way the middle of an operation every time, and I also have Putty. I want to also use phpMyAdmin; but, having spent several hours translating the setup instructions from the badly-written, poorly-spaced, badly punctuated semi-hieroglyphics of the Linux-ese dialect spoken by the writer, I’m stumped in a similar way on installing that too.

As a result of having mod_rewrite switched off I’ve had to change my URL structure to default. Now none of the existing search-engine listings can find any of my pages, + I’m not getting any brownie-points from them for decent easy-to-find URLs either.

I tried Pico for the very first time in Putty recently, in the hope that it would help me re-write the file at /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf , but all I got was a blank in the console, for whatever reason, rather than anything that I could edit.

So as I wrote before; I, as a total idiot when it comes to Linux, am seeking some advice in the form of a step-by-step idiot’s guide on every single thing that I need to do to accomplish this. The help of my readers would be greatly appreciated. I know I’m a noob, and whatever other Linux-ese insults the Linux-community wish to throw, so don’t bother: I’m just looking to get started using Linux properly: Isn’t using Linux what the Linux community want everyone to do; albeit in this case on a server?

Please leave your reply in the comments box below. Thank you.

In this article we’ll take a look at installing Windows 7: This article deals mainly with moving from XP straight to 7, bypassing Vista. Upgrading from Vista to 7 is quite a doddle in comparison.

With Microsoft’s proposed launch of Windows7 only a couple of months away at the time of writing; I thought it a good idea to write a piece on installing it; for those who’ve never done it yet. Microsoft have been fairly good this time round: They’ve asked their customers what they want included, they’ve given us a beta version to try, and also a Release Candidate following on from that, which sends telemetry back to Microsoft as you use it; therefore giving the makers the perfect statistics from millions of computers to tweak the release to near perfection prior to Release To Manufacturing (RTM).

How to install it depends on which operating system you were running prior to installing. I’m assuming you were running either Windows XP or Windows Vista. If you were running Windows 2000 then it’s time to change it fast: Its support lifecycle is ending. The same applies to Windows XP and Windows 2000 users – That being: No upgrade is available. – More on that later. If you were running Windows 9x then shame on you: Anything from Windows ME backwards is obsolete; meaning that Microsoft no longer issue patches for newly-discovered critical vulnerabilities that exist in the operating system, and your best bet is to reformat your hard-drive instantly, as your machine is probably crawling with malware and part of a botnet. – You’re also an unprotected propagation haven for it, you’re assisting in the spread of it, and the criminals who wrote and use it love you. – So much so that they’ll probably empty your bank account when it comes up on the massive list of accounts they’ve harvested from people like you who can’t be bothered to get a decent secure operating system, as they process that list. – I’d change your account password fast if I were you, but don’t use that old computer with Windows 9x on it to do so: For all you know someone could well have sneaked a keylogger onto it via a port opened by malware that got in through an unpatched vulnerability.

Back to the subject in hand: -

First; if your machine is capable of running a 64-bit operating system then I do suggest that you install Windows 7 64-bit. There is no reason, other than restriction by your machine, for you or anyone else to be running a 32-bit operating system with all its restrictions in this day and age. – None whatsoever. Let’s all work to kill off 32-bit computing once and for all. You can go from 32 to 64-bit straight off in a change of operating system without any problems; provided that your machine will run a 64-bit operating system. If your machine was built before 2005 then it might not be able to do so. If it was built after 2006 then it almost definitely can. (Although you might have to upgrade the processor on a few models – ?)

You might consider building or buying a whole new setup to run 7 on, as I did; leaving your old machine to run XP while your new box runs 7. There is a utility on the Windows 7 installation disc called The Migration Wizard (Windows Easy Transfer). This can extract your files and settings from your old machine and transfer them to your new machine, just like the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (FASTWiz; as I call it (Even though it was slow. – It’s faster in 7; though still a bit sluggish.).) did in XP: -

Navigate through the Windows 7 DVD to the \support\migwiz folder. Run the migsetup.exe program. The migsetup.exe program will scan your Windows XP installation drive for files and settings that can be migrated and show you a list of them. You can de-select and re-select items that you do or don’t want to migrate, and you can even add things from other drives. When you’re ready, the wizard compresses and stores all the items selected in a single file on a drive of your choice. (You should choose a drive other than the one to which you plan to install Windows 7 for this purpose.) You can even have migsetup.exe write to an external hard drive, flash drive, or writable DVD if you prefer.

If you’re installing Windows 7 having previously been running XP then you can’t do an in-place upgrade: You’ll have to either: -

• Back everything important; reformat, and install Windows 7.
• Dual-boot Windows 7 with XP.
• Upgrade XP to Vista, and then upgrade to 7.
• Install 7 on top of XP.

Back everything important; reformat, and install Windows 7. Remember to ensure that you have backed up everything important/irreplaceable if going the first route: This is in my mind the best route to take when upgrading from XP to 7.

If you own a "full" version of 7, then it’s safe to format the drive first before you attempt to install 7. If, on the other hand, you have an "upgrade" version of Windows 7, Windows XP must be running when Windows 7 is installed, otherwise the product activation will fail, unless you have the original Windows XP CD with you.

Insert your Windows 7 DVD and run Setup. When you’re asked if you want to format the target drive say "yes". The "Quick Format" option is faster than a full format, and it’ll do the trick. If you want to be pedantic then a full format will be fine too; if you have the time to spare. Setup will erase everything on that particular drive before it starts to install Windows 7. Now re-install all the things you saved with Migration Wizard if you wish to do so, or reinstall from your backup(s). – Target neutralised!

Dual-boot Windows 7 with XP. The dual-boot (Or triple-boot.) option is worth considering; particularly if you already run a dual-boot system; such as Windows XP and Linux. – Particularly if you want to keep your Linux installation; but triple-booting with Linux is beyond the scope of this article. I prefer to stick with Windows.

You may find that some Windows XP applications will not run under Windows 7. You can either do as this linked article suggests, and run XP inside a Virtual Machine inside 7, or you can partition your drive if you have lots of space, and install a separate OS per partition: – A “dual-boot setup”. – When you boot up you choose which OS to run. You’ll need to create a new partition on your hard drive, and probably  resize the existing partition also. Paragon Partition Manager and similar programs will do this for you, as will a number of free and demo-version disc-management programs, such as  Bootit NG from Terabyte Unlimited.

Once you’ve created your new partition, insert the Windows 7 DVD and run Setup and install to the new partition. When you restart your box after installing 7, you’ll have the option to start Windows XP or Windows 7. – ‘Good eh?

You might, alternatively, install a new, second, hard-drive and install Windows 7 on that after formatting it and getting it recognised by the operating system. This would be an alternative idea for a dual-boot setup if your existing disc is getting rather full and doesn’t have a lot of room on it to install 7.

Upgrade XP to Vista, and then upgrade to 7. The double-upgrade seems a crazy idea to me; and I can say with some near-certainty that something somewhere will go tits-up; even though you might not at first notice it. Myself I wouldn’t risk that. Do it if you must; but on your own head be it. I refuse to advise on this. – Sod that for a laugh!

Install 7 on top of XP. If you attempt to install 7 on top of XP the following will happen: Windows 7 installer will gather up all your XP operating-system files; including the My Documents folder, your profile folder, the lot, and stick them in a folder called “Windows.old” on your system drive. Windows 7 installer will then install Windows 7 in the space remaining. If your hard-drive is rather full prior to this I would suggest that you use the first method instead, or your new installation won’t have a lot of room to operate in. If you have more than 1 hard drive then Windows 7 installer will leave any secondary and subsequent drive untouched: It’s only interested in your system drive (C:, or whatever drive letter you choose to install to, only).

Although the Windows 7 installer will preserve most if not all of your files inside the XP installation intact inside Windows.old, there is no guarantee that it will preserve every file in a working condition, exactly as was before. You will not be able to run XP from inside of Windows.old either. The machine will boot into Windows 7 when started. Windows XP as an operating system is lost.

If you’re installing Windows 7 on a machine running Vista, then you can either use the first method, above, to do a clean reinstall, or simply upgrade your operating system with an in-place upgrade. I’m not sure why Microsoft have punished those people who didn’t upgrade to Vista in this way to be honest. – But they have, for whatever reason.

Have you installed Windows 7 yet? Do you have anything that you’d like to add to the above?

There are a number of email backup apps out there at the moment; some online, some locally stored on your computer, and saving the backups to said computer, One thing you might not hear a lot about are backups for your online social-networking. In the face of that I thought I’d tell you about a couple of apps that will back up some of your social networking activities:

The first of these is a service called Backup My Tweets. It’s a social media backup service that works with Twitter, and it’s absolutely free.  As Twitter doesn’t store more than 3200 tweets at a time, it’s a good idea to use this service.  The backups via this service will allow you to save your social media files as an XML file, a JSON file, or an HTML file.

Another backup service for social media sites is called SocialSafe. SocialSafe backs up your Facebook account. It does cost, but only $2.99, including add-ons and updates. It runs in Adobe Air, which you’ll need to install on your machine before installing and running this app. Having done so, you can backup everything in your Facebook account; photos, photos you were tagged in, posts and profile information, the lot. SocialSafe is platform-independent; so it won’t matter whether you run Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. Once you’ve backed up, you can access all the files from your local machine via a text editor (Notepad, Wordpad…), word processor, (Microsoft Word, Open Office…) and via photo-editing software if you so desire.

SocialSafe say that they intend to cover other social-networking services in addition to Facebook; and may indeed already do so by the time this article is published.

I still build desktop computers – and I love building desktop computers. Some people say that the desktop computer is dying out. I don’t agree. Whilst I do agree that, to a certain extent, desktops are becoming somewhat less popular, in favour of laptops and netbooks, I believe that desktops will always have their place for years to come, if not forever.

- So, to the question posed in the title; what do I think are the minimum specifications required for a desktop computer these days? That’s another multi-pronged question. You see it depends on two major factors; one with a sub-factor: -

1) Is the user intending to run a 32-bit or a 64-bit operating system on their desktop?

2)a) Is the user planning to really utilise their machine for all its intended and possible purposes, or b) is the user intending just to use it for email, instant messaging, and general office work?

With the advent of Windows 7 firmly fixed on the horizon and in full view, the need for the latest and greatest hardware in order to run the latest Microsoft operating system is somewhat negated. Windows 7 is a lot less resource-hungry than Vista, as well as being a far better-designed operating system. Nevertheless the hardware that one must by necessity use with it should be in the main Vista compatible; which means a few of the older PCs still working will not be able to run Windows 7.

(I have a friend whose husband has an old computer that I had a hand in upgrading, in that I supplied some secondhand hardware for its renovation. Nevertheless, despite now having 2GB DDR RAM, and other bits, fitted, it doesn’t like Windows 7, even though it now runs XP totally satisfactorily.)

If the user is planning to upgrade to Windows 7; or to run the Windows 7 RC up until either the RTM version appears, or until it starts to reboot every 2 hours on March 1st 2010, then the above should be taken into consideration. I do, however, suggest that anyone who buys or builds a new computer should run a 64-bit operating system on it. All modern processors produced today are 64-bit capable, and it seems a shame to waste available resources and at the same time limit the machine’s capabilities by running a 32-bit operating system.

However, that brings me to question 1 above: If I’m building a computer for a customer I give them what they want, rather than what I think they should have. Whilst it’s true that I do advise the customer; and I can be quite persuasive at times (Ex-salesperson.), at the end of the day it’s the customer’s money and the customer’s choice.

So if they are positive that they are never going to run a 64-bit operating system, despite their processor and the rest of their hardware being fully capable of doing so, then that’s a good excuse to skimp on the RAM: If ‘intending just to use it for email, instant messaging, and general office work only, with a 32-bit operating system, then 2GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM should be easily enough; whether they’re running XP or Windows 7.

If the customer insists on running Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate edition; whether or not it’s just to try and look “cool”, then the processor will need to have certain features: -

Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate edition have a feature called XP Mode: XP Mode requires your computer to have at least 2GB RAM, which we were intending to fit anyway, as well as to be running a processor that has Chip-Level Virtualisation built into its architecture: In other words you’ll need an AMD processor that supports AMD-V, or an Intel processor that supports Intel VT. – This will need to be taken into account.

Otherwise, just for for email, instant messaging, and general office work only, an AMD Athlon 64 x 2 would appear to be just the job as a processor in this case.

In an identical case where the user intends to run a 64-bit operating system; 4GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM would be an idea; just to give it that bit extra oomph, considering the extra 2GB will only add around £20 to the price at today’s prices.

Then we come to 2)b) The user who wants to do everything possible with their PC:-

A 32-bit operating system is going to be a limitation in this case; so 64-bit is decided by default. Since it’s 64-bit; stick as much of the fastest RAM possible in as the motherboard allows why not? Use a motherboard that will take an Intel Core i7 processor running as much DDR3 as possible.

In the main, 4GB is the most that Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit uses under normal circumstances, but with the price of RAM as low as it is, and even DDR3 is dropping in price slowly, whack a good few gigs in why not? – Even if it’s just to prove that a 64-bit system can see it.

(I have a box running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate RC with 8GB DDR2 800MHz RAM in it. I’ve only managed to get it to use 5GB under pressure as yet.)

Now to the graphics card: Graphics cards these days shouldn’t be less than 250MB in my opinion. – That’s not just because Windows 7 requires that much for the Aero Interface; it’s because of the demands made on the graphics at some point by almost everything these days. – So a 250MB card as a minimum, 500MB if you prefer, 1GB+/ quad SLI, whatever, if you or your customer are a gamer; depending on whether the machine’s for you or to sell on.

Just a minute… Wait, wait, wait: We have a minimum-spec office or OAP’s machine here, and a gamers’ box too. What if the customer/user isn’t an OAP/office worker or a gamer?

Well for me, for instance: I run a blog. I need at least 2 working computers; just in case 1 goes down. I’m doing most of my work on a dual-core AMD-powered machine with a 32-bit XP operating system and 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM. The other box I’ve already mentioned. It has an AMD Phenom triple-cored CPU, 250MB graphics, and I’ll be using it later in the year with Windows 7 Home Premium RTM as my main box, while the XP box becomes the spare. Yes I’ll keep XP on it until 2014, and if it’s still working/not been dismantled/sold by then I’ll install Windows 7 on it and relegate it to the bedroom. I would imagine that Windows 7’s successor will at least be in beta by then.

To attempt to conclude, then: Anything from an AMD Athlon 64 x 2 upwards, depending upon discretion, is currently acceptable for a processor in my opinion. Single-cored processors are out. I will never ever use another single-cored processor if I can possibly avoid doing so. DDR2 (667MHz) upwards is OK for RAM, once again using discretion. Graphics should never be anything under 250MB.

I use that as a guide at present; although next year (2010) it might be a complete new ball-game? Who knows?

I will say again, though, as a final point, there’s no reason, unless you have a rather old computer, not to run a 64-bit version of the Windows 7 operating system. I positively encourage everyone to do so if they can. It’s time we ushered in the 64-bit computing age. 32-bit is becoming lame and is old-hat. – Maybe that would be a good name for a retro 32-bit Linux distro: Old Hat? The mind boggles…

Whilst I agree that there must be fair legislation with regard to anticompetitive practices, it may appear that the European Union has gone over the top in its latest antitrust probe against Microsoft: -

From Computer Buyer Magazine’s website: -

“The European Commission has told Microsoft that it believes the tying of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser with its Windows operating system infringes EU antitrust laws.

The Commission has sent a Statement of Objections (SO) to Microsoft which outlines its view that the tying of IE to Windows provides Internet Explorer with an artificial distribution advantage which other web browsers are unable to match. This “harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice”.

It EU executive is also concerned that “the ubiquity of IE creates artificial incentives for content providers and software developers to design websites or software primarily for Internet Explorer which ultimately risks undermining competition and innovation in the provision of services to consumers”.

Microsoft has eight weeks to reply the SO and will then have the right to an Oral Hearing. If SO findings confirmed, the Commission may impose a fine and require Microsoft to make changes to Windows that would ameliorate the Commission’s concerns.

In a short statement, Microsoft said it was still examining the SO.

“We are committed to conducting our business in full compliance with European law. We are studying the Statement of Objections now.”

The decision to issue the SO is based on legal principles established in the 2007 ruling by the European Court of First Instance, which upheld the Commission’s 2004 finding that Microsoft had abused its dominant position in the PC operating system market by tying Windows Media Player to its operating system.

That judgement saw Microsoft release a special N version of Windows XP without Media Player, which remained available as a free download. The company was also fined and has to date been ordered to pay fines totalling €1.68 billion for this and other antitrust violations.”

This is just too much: It’s no secret that the EU is a corrupt powerbase of political subterfuge and scam-mongering. This appears to be just another attempt to swell the EU coffers even further. Not content in just charging Britain millions of Euros in membership fees so that European politicians can hire call-girls and throw lush parties, the Eurocrats like to have a stab at Microsoft from time to time; as Microsoft is where the money is. In early 2008, Microsoft was fined 899m Euros by the European Commission for anti-competitive behaviour over bundling in the Windows Media Player and browser into Windows. As if that wasn’t enough loot for them, they’ve decided to have a second snipe and see if they can get some more out of the software giant.

Now this is rather ancient news from Computer Buyer; as on the 16th June I reported on this in the article “Europe Doesn’t want IE8”, and I also reported Microsoft’s solution to the problem: -

“In order to comply with European competition law, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 will be removed from the European versions of Windows 7. Microsoft made the decision to drop the web browser in order to stay on the right side of the European Commission and avoid further possible fines. Versions of Windows 7 released in Europe will have an E suffix to show that they are European versions that don’t include Internet Explorer.”

- So if they don’t include IE then what browser do they include?

Internet Explorer is a fundamental software component of the Windows operating system; and it goes a lot deeper than just the browser GUI that IE users see. Without IE, there is, in all reality, no Windows as such. Without IE there are just a number of disjointed codes resembling an incomplete operating system. Conversely, Windows Media Player is more an app than an integral part of Windows.

This becomes puzzling now: How, if there’s no browser, does the customer add a browser so that they can download anything? ‘Beats me!

According to the BBC Website, in an article from 12th June 2009: -

"In terms of potential remedies, if the Commission were to find that Microsoft had committed an abuse, the Commission has suggested that consumers should be offered a choice of browser not that Windows should be supplied without a browser at all," said the Commission in a statement responding to Microsoft’s announcement.

It said Microsoft’s approach of offering the program to computer manufacturers "may potentially be more positive" in terms of remedying its alleged abusive behaviour.”

-Which still doesn’t really answer the question. – I mean if I were to buy a copy of Windows 7 E, post RTM, to install on a computer that I just built: OK I’ve installed it. How do I get a browser onto it? There is no browser. – No wait; I have a choice of browser? – If the EU have their way then yes. OK; I’ll install FireFox. Is that how it’s going to be? That would actually be rather good.

- The Eurocrats are targeting the IE GUI itself perhaps; and maybe they have a point: If the IE GUI is supplied along with Windows then it gives the IE browser an unfair advantage in a way; because many computer users aren’t geeks. -  In fact many (European) computer users are rather clueless when it comes to computers. – Other than instant messaging, browsing to find their family tree, and email, they really don’t have much idea of anything else that the internet has to offer. (I know, it’s a bit of a wild assertion; but if a lot of British users are anything to go by then it’s true.) – Therefore, when they buy the Windows operating system from Microsoft they stick it on their computer as is, if it isn’t preinstalled, and they use it as is: Sucky browser, the lot. Possibly half of them aren’t even aware that there’s an alternative to IE. The other half may have heard of FireFox, Opera, Safari… But are of the attitude: “If it works; why fix it?”

…But Microsoft have even included a function in Windows 7 to deactivate IE – The GUI bit, that is, for people who don’t want IE on their computer at all, even though they run Windows, as a primary or secondary OS. (Linux users come to mind.) Nevertheless the non-nerdy users probably won’t bother to deactivate IE and choose an alternative browser.

So what are the choices? Supply Windows with another browser? That’ll give the new browser an unfair advantage no matter which browser they use; although the Eurocrats may have problems getting any money out of Microsoft for promoting another company’s browser. – But Microsoft themselves probably wouldn’t be too happy about promoting someone else’s product.

What if they supplied Windows with no browser and let the customer make up their own mind which one to install? – The problem then would be that the customer has absolutely no way of downloading any software whatsoever: No browser = no browsing = no downloads.

Email a browser to the customer. – Yeah right. As soon as the malware distributors hear of that they’ll spoof the email and get everyone to download tons of malware into a blind operating system. Forget that straight away: It’s a definite non-starter.

The only option left, then, is to include a copy of every browser available that works with Windows on the installation disc, and let the customer choose which one is to be used from the offing as the operating system installs. As I said before; that appears to be how it’s going to work; but we might have to wait until the RTM to know for certain.

What do you think?

P.S. The next EU antitrust suite against Microsoft will probably be targeting Windows Live Mail, or maybe even Windows itself: -

“The European Commission has told Microsoft that it believes the tying of Microsoft’s Windows operating system with its range of Windows operating systems infringes EU antitrust laws.” 

– The Eurocrats have got to find enough money to continue to live in the lap of luxury somehow. – Those call-girls cost quite a bit!

It’s Wednesday 24th June 2009 and it’s kkomp.com’s first birthday today. It feels like I started this blog aeons ago, (Really, it does. It feels like I’ve been blogging for a number of years; yet it seems like only yesterday I had my 40th birthday.) and also only a few days ago too. In the year since this blog started I’ve made about 430 posts in 24 categories. – That’s not to mention the pages. My initial intention of enough content creation to place this blog on the blogosphere map has to all intents and purposes come to fruition, and some.

A year ago the world was facing the fact that we were in a global recession courtesy of the greedy international banking system. From what I hear lately, the UK appears to be pulling out of it: The economic growth report for March 2009 appears to indicate that GDP and growth returned to a positive figure in the case of UK. Although one leaf doesn’t make a summer; it appears that there are definite signs of a recovery on the way for Blighty.

- But; as some prominent bloggers have asked; where exactly is, or where exactly was, this massive economic downturn? More than not it appears to have been largely created within the minds of negatively-biased individuals by a media-led frenzy. The press will do anything to sell newspapers. A few businesses disappeared, true: That can and does even happen in times of economic prosperity though. Were there people claiming that the end of the world is nigh, that the commercial system as we knew it was going into meltdown? Of course there were: ‘Probably the same doom-mongers who did the same thing in the last recession, and the one before that too. – But the car-parks are still just as full at the shopping-malls as they always were, the traffic still flowed as per usual on the highways and byways, the world continued turning.

I accept that the world financial institutions made crazy speculative investments which lost them billions: perhaps they’ll now learn that putting spotty teenagers with a constant hangover and greedy out-of-control excuses for businesspeople in charge of the world monetary system is a definite recipe for its doom.

As we hopefully begin to emerge from this major economic turbulence we find that the world is still changing in our favour: By “our” I mean those of us who are building our world online. Social networking and global communication has, and will most likely continue to, cause the storm-clouds to depart and to build bridges of co-operation and opportunity for businesses globally. The remainder of the commercial entities will be forced to follow suit. Unfortunately for those of the old-school; opportunity and inter-corporate/interpersonal connectivity will continue to elude them, and they will fade away to be replaced by those who are operating under the new electronically-connected socio-commercial framework that has arisen from technological and societal advancement and the evolution of civilisation that has ensued as a result of that progress.

As I pointed out earlier, during the last year this blog has accrued around 430 posts, mainly of late technologically-orientated material dealing with basic practical and theoretical electronics and/or computer hardware and software, punctuated here and there by a news item or two which stood out to me, along with the odd mystical/Pagan-themed post.

Like a human child; this blog started without form, just a cell of an idea, fertilised and conceived a year ago on a whim, following a suggestion from someone who was already a blogger. Having no womb to mature within, it slowly took form in the wild, evolving with the mainly indirect assistance of a number of professionals who advised and directed with regard to its construction, renovation, changes, layout, and to a limited extent its content.

My naivety during the first couple of months of managing this blog was a little more prolific than I’d imagined it would be. I remember my first move as my brainchild came into existence was to announce on the social media channels, which I’d only recently become familiar with and had managed to pick up 1 or 2 followers, that I now have a blog: here’s the URL; please come visit. Well 1 or 2 people did visit, for about as long as it took to hit their back button on their browser.

I’d heard of people making fortunes on the internet; but somehow connected it with the dot com boom of the turn of the century, and regarded it as a thing of the past. Spring 2008 turned to Summer, my web 1.0 website at kustomkomputa.co.uk didn’t appear to be attracting much if any business, and I was starting to become extremely despondent. – Then a pro-blogger by the name of David Risley suggested I start a blog using WordPress. – Well what I was doing at the time wasn’t working; so in for a penny… Why the heck not?

I had been using Word 10 as an html editor to build kustomkomputa.com: It was difficult, cumbersome, and the resultant pages were full of so much unnecessary html that they took quite some time to load even with a broadband connection. Despite this I’d become used to Microsoft Word, and I even understood most of the crap html in it.

WordPress was a totally different kettle of fish though. I downloaded it, looked at the files and their contents, and screamed inside. .php – I’d never learned any php. .css – I had even less idea about css. Html: No problem; even Microsoft Word. – Especially Microsoft Word. Php and css, though, looked like Chinese to me.

By the time I’d installed WordPress on the server my head was so drenched in sweat I thought I’d just washed my hair! – But I’d done it. – And it didn’t work. Check: Had I done everything right? Yes. I’d triple checked everything before I started, and triple checked it again after every stage while I was doing it. having triple checked everything afterwards I eventually discovered that fasthosts.co.uk Windows servers were no good for running WordPress on. I’d specifically asked them beforehand: -

“Are your Windows servers able to run WordPress?”

Answer: “I don’t know. Nobody’s ever run WordPress from our servers before.”

- When pressed: “Well I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work on a Windows server. If you install it and it doesn’t work properly then we can always put you on a Linux server instead. The transfer won’t cost anything, our Linux servers cost exactly the same price to use as our Windows servers, and it’ll only take a few minutes to swap over.”

It didn’t work on their Windows server. – As promised they transferred me to a Linux server, and I installed WordPress again. This time it worked straight off and without problem.

Advice:

1) If using fasthosts.co.uk as your host for a self-hosted WordPress blog; always choose their Linux servers as your server.

     1a) Always use a Linux server wherever possible: Linux is a much better server platform than Windows.

2) Don’t use fasthosts.co.uk, unless you want to be wound up in red tape.

I hope you like reading; There’s more: -

To start with I didn’t really bother too much about presentation as far as the pages were concerned, which was my first mistake: After a false start earlier in June 2008, where it ended up that I took the entire blog down and restarted from scratch due to some kind of major problem. – I can’t remember what exactly, I downloaded and used a pre-built theme, threw up a Welcome page – almost literally by the previous look of it, and concentrated on turning out content.

I decided to break the mould of how most blogs were operating early on, by having a Welcome page initially, which visitors not linking from a link to an article would arrive at, rather than having the entire content of my posts appearing in chronological order on that initial page. Unfortunately the element that was missing was a contents listing, other than a table of the ten latest posts in the sidebar. This was a matter that wasn’t remedied until 2009, which was another major mistake I made. I agree that it would have been more sensible to attend to the matter earlier, but as things turned out it didn’t happen that way. We live and learn.

Although I’d written a number of papers over the past few years; I didn’t then classify myself as a writer, and maybe it showed. A few of my articles at the time were articles featuring content throughout that I’d created myself, but they were mainly seemingly less than quality content. In the main I concentrated upon relaying news items that I found to be of interest more than anything else.

Quite obviously, since there were an almost infinite number of alternative and better-known sources of the news that I was relaying; people stuck with what they knew, and other than a few visits sent by Google I didn’t get much traffic at all. Also, although I’d downloaded and installed the tools for search-engine-optimisation, I hadn’t configured them properly, (- As I actually wasn’t aware that they required further configuration in the early days, and I also didn’t know how to do it anyway, had I even been aware.) which didn’t help either.

During July 2008 I’d started to introduce advertising via advertisments that I’d created myself with links back to Clickbank. This however generated very little, if any, revenue.

By September 2008 I’d started to relay the news items whilst also including my personal take on them. Although this helped, it still didn’t have that much upwards-effect on my traffic figures. Despite having trained in electronics, as well as having a number of years of experience with computers, I felt at the time still very naive and vulnerable when it came to blogging, pretty much throughout 2008. Despite this though, I noticed that this blog was nevertheless ranked 5-million and-something-th at the time.

In October 2008, I think it was, I began to properly configure my SEO plugins, such as All-in-One-SEO-Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, etc. This did begin to have a positive effect, and the number of unique visitors began to increase somewhat. I also began utilising further free tips from David Risley, which also helped.

By December 2008 the blog was attracting a more realistic audience figure, and I set my attention upon the blog’s homepage, as well as the header and footer.php files, with the intention of tidying it up and making it look more attractive. Php still worried me, as although it was quite easy to understand, I was constantly having issues with the syntax of anything I wrote. Also most of what I wrote clashed with the style.css file of my theme. Although my effort eventually improved the page considerably, the resultant page was too crowded, not designed well, and the colour scheme failed to convey the theme of the blog. Many female readers liked it; but since the blog was attracting a mainly male, older, audience, I felt that it wasn’t a sensible option to allow things to continue that way.

I worked on and designed an entirely new home (Welcome) page, in addition the the header and footer, and implemented in during January and February 2009. I also edited and redesigned the theme to be more in tune with the central subject material of the blog.

Previous to this, although the subject matter had been mainly of a technical bent, I hadn’t really had a theme for the blog as such, nor had I used the blog’s design to clearly indicate the subject matter to my readers; which probably left some readers in somewhat of a quandary as to exactly what it was that I was trying to convey herein.

Also the footer, (footer.php) at one point during 2008 had a serious php error in it which caused a number of problems. These issues were rectified when I almost totally rewrote the header using a lot of html in addition to attending to the php already present – which was enhanced, and also in addition I repaired and enhanced the footer.

In doing so I introduced a header banner, which I enhanced over a number of weeks. I’ve since moved the RSS link into the header, and provided the mailing-list-subscription link high in the sidebar, above the fold, by writing its script into the sidebar.php file. I also introduced a contents page,clearly linked to from the header as well as the Welcome page.

A lot of the inspiration for the redesign came from Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick’s “Becomeablogger” course, which I bought into earlier this year, admittedly a little late. Whilst I haven’t yet implemented all of the suggestions within the course material by any means yet, it has nevertheless helped me out no end. The Becomeablogger course will be having its second run soon, and the enrolment window will be between 29th June and 3rd July 2009. As soon as the window opens I’ll be advertising it in the header of this blog, so if you’d like to join up you’ll have the opportunity to do so via this blog.

One of the biggest issues for me over this past year has been avoiding clutter, both in the sidebar and on the Welcome page. The sidebar is an area which I’ve particularly concentrated upon in this respect, along with its appearance, as the sidebar appears along with almost every page and post. My intention has been to not let it detract the reader’s attention overly from the main article. I hope I succeeded in that.

That’s summed up some of the main points of the blog’s evolution over the time since its creation. No doubt it will continue to evolve further with time; hopefully in a positive manner.

The Future

So what will I be doing on this blog in the future? For the immediate future nothing much is scheduled to change. I’ll be writing more free content fairly regularly, plus making the odd tweak to the theme perhaps. I’ll be adding further advertising of top-quality products from other bloggers and online businesspeople, plus also I will probably be writing more reviews of a number of them.

At some point I’m hoping to be adding podcasts to the mix – Maybe followed by video too. I don’t have a schedule for doing so planned out at this point, so I can’t be any more definite than that at this present moment.

A year has passed, and the blog is still up and running. I have the feeling that the following year will contain many profitable and beneficial additions; both for you the visitor as well as for me the blogger, plus any help in the form of people that I take on in the future.

That’s about it for this post then: A year older and wiser.

Enjoy the rest of the Summer if you live in the upper Northern hemisphere. If you live in the lower Southern hemisphere you can take heart in the fact that midwinter has passed. Wherever you are, enjoy the rest of the year, and don’t forget to return regularly to kkomp.com to see what’s new. If you happen to be in space or on another planet then enjoy the break, and if you aren’t part of the Human Race from Earth and you actually live on another planet then I invite you to make contact with the us Humans. – We’re a peculiar civilisation, but most of us still have some semblance of normality left I believe.

If you’re not on the mailing list then it would be a good idea to subscribe to it and get notified by email. You might also like to subscribe to the RSS feed for notification too.

Finally I invite comments/constructive criticisms/remarks… You know the drill.

You may or may not have heard of the term RAID when applied to hard-drives. RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and is a system where a number of identical hard-drives can be utilised in a number of pre-defined configurations for the purposes of reinforcing data storage and/or extending the capacity of a single hard-drive across a number of drives while the operating system sees them all as one single drive. For more information on the types of RAID configuration available, see this article.

In my opinion; running a RAID array on your home system configured as a workstation isn’t really a viable idea. It can add a considerable amount of cost to your hardware budget; even with the falling cost of larger hard-drives, it is not much less prone to failure than a standard setup in such circumstances, and it can use considerably more wattage, putting extra strain on the PSU and spitting in the eye of environmental campaigners.

I won’t go into all the details of the various types of RAID array and their individual advantages and disadvantages at this point: Time and space constraints don’t allow me to write the eBook that I’d need to write in order to do the subject justice.

Server systems, however; particularly public servers, are a completely different kettle of fish with regard to using RAID; particularly in terms of backup:

As you may be aware, certain RAID configurations, such as RAID 1, automatically copy the data content of one disk to the other/another, in a technique known as “mirroring”. – Therefore, should one of the discs develop a data-error of some kind; the RAID-controller can instantly pick up the fact that the two discs have a data discrepancy, after which it can check the parity of the relevant areas of both discs individually, and discern which of the two has failed; then replace the data on the erroneous disc with the uncorrupted data on the non-erroneous disc. This saves the server system fro  having to call on a probably already busy technician to attend to the issue and run chkdsk or some similar tool to resolve the data error on a single drive.

In addition to this; should there be an error caused by irretrievable bad sectors on one of the drives, the original mirrored data is stored in its original form on another disc, and the server system signals a repair technician to replace the malfunctioning drive, after which the system restores the non-corrupted data to the new drive from the still-working mirrored drive.

The upshot of this is that the system can keep running with minimal if any interruption, and the workload on the technician is minimised. The last thing a server centre would wish for is avoidable downtime where a data error has to be manually repaired by the duty tech.

The above applies, not only to public internet servers, but to a slightly lesser extent to business and home servers; whether connected to serve a domain or as part of a Local Area Network or LAN.

In conclusion, then, a RAID array is a most useful thing to run on any type of server; particularly RAID 1 or similar. – However for a home or office computer used as a workstation I wouldn’t really consider setting up a RAID array as it just gives rise to unnecessary complications.

- Having said that; there may be circumstances where a RAID array on a terminal or workstation might be a good thing. Do you, the reader, have any ideas where this may be applicable? if so then please feel free to comment further to the above.

As a last minute addition, I’ll just add, as I’ve also said elsewhere, Linux is always a better operating system for servers in my opinion. Although I normally use Windows only on my desktop, with my Linux usage being so infrequent as to be negligible in that respect; I would nevertheless recommend Linux (Red Hat and others.) way more than I would recommend Windows for use with a server system.

In short; and you have every right to disagree if you wish, my preference is Windows for workstations, Linux for servers. – And yes it is possible to run RAID in Linux.

Advertisment: -

Despite the claim by Mac users that their operating system is safer than Windows and much more secure; there is a chink in the armour. No, I’m not referring to a Chinese knight; I’m actually referring to something that would better be described as a gaping chasm rather than a chink: There’s still a large security vulnerability in Mac OS X with regard to Java; and it’s never yet been patched by Apple. It’s already been patched in both Windows and Linux.

According to kdawson, writing on slashdot.org: -

"Security researchers say that Mac OS X users are vulnerable to a critical, 6-month-old, remote vulnerability in Java, a component that is enabled by default in Web browsers on this platform. Julien Tinnes notes that this vulnerability differs from typical Java security flaws in that it is ‘a pure Java vulnerability’ and doesn’t involve any native code. It affected not only Sun’s Java but other implementations such as OpenJDK, on multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows. ‘This means you can write a 100% reliable exploit in pure Java. This exploit will work on all the platforms, all the architectures and all the browsers,’ Julien wrote. This bug was demonstrated during the Pwn2own security challenge this year at CanSecWest, but the details were not made public at that time. Tinnes recommends that Mac OS X users disable Java in their browsers until Apple releases a security update."

Here’s how to disable Java in your Safari and FireFox browsers in Mac OS X: -

If you still need Java access, I suggest that you install NoScript into FireFox. (See also.)

To disable Java in Safari on Mac OS X, click the Safari tab in the menu at the top right of your screen. Click Preferences in the drop-down list. In the Security section of the preferences window, uncheck Enable Java.

To disable Java in Firefox on Mac OS X, click the Firefox tab in the menu at the top right of your screen.In the Content section of the preferences window, uncheck Enable Java.

It appears that Mac users are deluding themselves that Macs are more secure than PCs: Just because something gets attacked less doesn’t mean it’s more secure.

CoolPreviews is an extremely useful add-on to the FireFox (& IE6) web-browser that allows you to preview a hyperlinked page’s content without actually clicking on the hyperlink. This can be particularly useful when browsing a site with many hyperlinks as it allows you to view hyperlinks without actually clicking on them and opening the page in FireFox.

Firefox 2.0-3.5b4+ required.

Having installed CoolPreviews, you’ll see a little blue magnifying-glass icon after a hyperlink when you mouse-over it. Clicking that icon will cause CoolPreviews to present its own sub-window within your FireFox or IE6 browser, in which a preview will be displayed. This preview can be locked so that it doesn’t vanish when you remove the mouse-pointer from the CoolPreviews window.

I’ve tested this FireFoxadd-on in Windows XP Professional (32-bit) and also in Windows Seven RC (64-bit). It will also work in Windows Vista, Mac osX, and Linux.

There is also a version for use with Internet Explorer 6: This version doesn’t work with IE 7 or IE 8; however I have noticed that the majority of my readers who use Internet Explorer as their preferred browser actually have IE 6 installed; therefore I thought this worth a mention. (Incidentally; also worth a mention is that IE6 is getting rather dated. Although it’s not as sucky as IE7 to my mind, it’s probably worth upgrading to IE8 if you want to stay with IE, unless you have a very old computer that’s short on resources. Also, once again unless you have a very old computer with depleted resources – Particularly with regard to RAM – it would be worth your while to install FireFox in addition to IE in my humble opinion, even if you continue to use IE as your default browser.)

- And the best thing of all is, of course, that this add-on is absolutely free of charge. – So why not download it? If you don’t have FireFox and don’t use IE6 then why not download FireFox as well? (‘Awaiting brownie points from Mozilla.)

Here are the links again: –

CoolPreviews

FireFox

Xmarks (Formerly Foxmarks.) is probably one of the most useful pieces of free software that I’ve featured on this blog to this day. It’s a browser plugin. It currently works with Internet Explorer (Including IE8), FireFox, and Safari. – So whether you use Windows, Linux, or Mac osX, it can work for you.

(Although it’s not from Google, it’s marked as  a beta, and probably always will be; just like most of Google’s software is. – Think of it as a work constantly in progress. (Perhaps I should rename this blog to “Beyond (beta)” in that case?)

Xmarks allows synchronisation of your added bookmarks and stored passwords with a secure online server. – Therefore if you ever have to reinstall your browser you can simply upload all of them from the server. Also, if you have more than one computer, no matter how far away they are from each other, providing that they’re both on planet Earth, you can synchronise your bookmarks and passwords between the two via the secure server.

From the Xmarks page on Mozilla Corp’s website:

“It takes only a moment to get up and running with Xmarks. After you install the add-on, click on the notification to set up Xmarks and start backing up and synchronizing your bookmarks. Install Xmarks on each computer you use, and it seamlessly integrates with your web browser and keeps your bookmarks safely backed up and in sync.
Xmarks will sync across browsers too. Today we support Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari (Mac OS). Please visit our website at xmarks.com for details.”

Also from the same website:
“Secure Password Sync is an optional Xmarks feature. If you’d like to learn more about how it works, visit: http://www.xmarks.com/about/features/secure_password_sync”

 
“Xmarks provides seamless bookmark synchronization between your computers and browsers via our synchronization server. Your bookmark (and optionally password) data is securely stored and backed up on our servers.”

Users of this service include technology nerd and problogger David Risley, as well as myself.

Xmarks can prove to be an invaluable tool to keep your browsers synchronised. Download links follow: -

FireFox

Internet Explorer

Safari

In 2003; AMD introduced the first 64-bit processor targeted at the average consumer, the single-cored Athlon 64, onto the market. Six years later, and now virtually all processors produced at the present moment are 64-bit capable. Also most processors used these days have 2 or more cores, enabling approximately 1.7 times or more of the functionality of a single-cored CPU.

Meanwhile, leaving the minority operating systems, such as Linux, and Mac osX – which only runs well on an Apple computer anyway, aside; between 2001 and almost up to the present day the market leader of operating systems, namely Microsoft Windows, has in reality been fairly stagnant. Despite the release of Windows Vista in January 2007, which in many ways went down like a lead balloon from the offing, most people have been using Windows XP since 2001. (Myself included.(Well, since January 2002 to be exact. – I stayed with Windows 98SE until I managed to afford a new computer. – Things were a bit tighter then.) Back in the days when XP was launched, everyone was using a single-cored processor that was only 32-bit capable. In those days 250 megabytes of RAM was considered a vast amount, a 60GB hard-drive had a massive amount of space on it, the Intel Pentium 4 was the latest cutting-edge CPU, (The new machine I bought in 2002 had a first-generation P4 2.8GHz processor installed.) 32MB graphics were considered the norm, and 64MB were considered leading-edge… Nobody but the extreme-geeks wanted 64-bit operating systems; and therefore most of the XP CDs sold were 32-bit. 32-bit became the norm, became known. It was taught that computers went from 4-bits in the 1960s and 70s, (Commodore Pet) to 8-bits (16-colours!) in the 1980s, to 16-bits (DOS) and then to 32-bits (Windows 95 et al.) in the 1990s. – And from there a general feeling amongst the less-computer-literate that this was the ultimate destiny, that technology had no need to progress further than that. Windows 98SE became replaced by the excuse for an operating system known as Windows ME, and shortly afterwards by Windows 2000, which combined the advances made in ME with the lessons learned from ME: The limited and insecure FAT32 file-system which Microsoft had previously hailed as the way ahead, was falling out of favour, and customers had the choice now of using either FAT32 or the far superior NTFS disk-formats. Not far down the road came XP; which built on the lessons learned from 2000, and XP and 2000 were the in-thing. Many people stuck to using 98SE and ME, in addition to those using 2000 and XP.

Support for 98SE and ME was eventually discontinued; but to this day some die-hards still use those operating systems, despite their now being a massive security-risk both in terms of the user and of the rest of the internet-community as a whole. XP became the principle operating system, even holding out extremely well against the newer Windows Vista, which flopped from launch. – This caused consternation among many of the Microsoft faithful; many of whom switched to Linux and Apple’s Mac in protest.

Despite all this; the remaining Microsoft community – which only shrank in size by a few percent due to defectors to Linux and Mac – stayed in the 32-bit frame of mind. A few took up 64-bit computing with Vista after SP1. Even fewer took up 64-bit computing with XP after SP2 and 3.

Meanwhile; Apples Mac community; its numbers swelled with Vista detractors, was already completely 64-bit. Linux distros appeared utilising the 64-bit potential of modern machines also. Microsoft people either didn’t appear to know or care about 64-bit computing: 32-bit computing appeared good enough so why change? There was and still remains a danger of getting stuck in a rut.

What’s the big deal about 64-bit computing then? Why should I want to use a 64-bit operating system as opposed to a 32-bit operating system?

Let me ask you this: (I know a question in answer to a question may be considered lame; but bear with me here.) Why would you want to use a 32-bit operating system as opposed to a 16-bit operating system? Because 32-bit has more capabilities, right? – Like 32 million colours as opposed to 256 colours…

No I’m not saying that there’s several trillion colours in 64-bit…. Well there may in fact be so; but it’s a bit pointless to use that as a reason to upgrade, as the human eye only sees just over 24 million different colours. The main thing about 64-bit operating systems is that they enable your computer to work with more memory. (RAM) – Vastly more in fact: These days applications are demanding more and more RAM and other system resources to be in use on your computer in order to run them. – But there’s a limit to how much RAM you can use per system. If you’re running a 32-bit operating system you can use up to around 3.5 gigabytes of RAM. In 2001 that must have seemed like a colossal amount of memory. These days 2 gigabytes is standard. – On a computer with a 32-bit operating system that is.

I’m typing this on a computer that I built in December 2008. This computer has 2 GB RAM, an AMD Athlon 64 x 2 dual-core 64-bit capable processor… Yet as with most such computers belonging to most people, it’s currently running a 32-bit XP Professional operating system.

The computer next to it, which I built in April 2009, has 4GB RAM – and today I bought another 4 GB RAM which I intend to fit soon. It has an AMD Phenom triple-cored 64-bit-enabled processor and is currently running Windows 7 RC 64-bit.

My point is that this year a new Windows operating system is going to be launched. – But this is no Vista: This one’s Windows 7. It works almost flawlessly and neither I nor several of my online acquaintances can find anything to complain about with regard to it. – And this is before it’s even been fully released! – OK ‘straight to the point: Which is that 32-bit is so 1990s and 2000s. Next year we’ll be entering the 2010s and, as usual, technology will be moving on at its standard fast-pace.

Windows 7 will be available in both 32 and 64-bit versions. If you have a 64-bit capable computer and buy and/or load 32-bit Windows 7 you won’t be doing yourself any favours. When Windows 95 was released it was possible to run a 16-bit operating system on a 32-bit computer designed to run Windows 95. – Try running one of today’s apps in a 16-bit environment though. It wouldn’t run. Even if it did run; the machines that were around when 16-bit was the in-thing would hardly be capable of running a single app that’s used today. (I tried running XP Home on a computer powered by a Pentium 1 processor. (1996/7 IIRC.) It was 32-bit capable so it ran: Badly and tediously slowly. It took 1/2 hour to boot…)

In a few years your 32-bit operating system won’t be capable of running the applications of the time properly and in multiples, because they’ll need more memory than is able to be utilised by a 32-bit operating system. Remember; a 32-bit operating system can only see about 3.5 gigabytes at one time. A 64-bit operating system can see and use over 16 million terabytes of RAM though. That should be all you need for a few years yet.

Do yourself a favour: When you move up to Windows 7; get a 64-bit version of the operating system (Provided that your system is 64-bit capable.(Most systems built in the last 2 years are 64-bit capable. If unsure ask your retailer or an experienced geek.)) It’s time everyone snapped out of this 32-bit mentality; it’s so yesterday. – It’s like choosing to drive a Reliant Robin in favour of a Porsche.

Let’s all break the mould and go 64-bit. I intend to do so; and it’s in everyone’s best interests to do likewise.

Do you agree?

Mary Landesman wrote an article on About.com, which brought up some interesting points. Three different free antivirus solutions were tested: AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic, AVAST 4 Home Edition, and AVG Free Edition. Of these; AVAST! (Which I use.) fared the best, detecting 92% of zoo viruses. AntiVir came second with an 85% detection rate, and AVG was in last place with only 81% detection rate.

When it came to being fast at releasing updates against major threats though, AntiVir was tops, with Avast! in second place, and AVG once again lagging behind in last place.

Although all three solutions claim to give protection against spyware and adware, they’re all fairly lousy at doing so. Avast! was again the best; despite scoring only 33%. AVG was yet again in last place.

As with everything else, you get what you pay for; so if you need an active all-round security suite I personally recommend the paid-for Kaspersky Internet Security Complete Protection , which has in test after test proved to be one of the best security solutions on the market. Linux users and geeky types may prefer NOD32/Eset Smart Security, which is also one of the best out there – Although I personally found it to be a bit bloated when I tested it last year (2008) in November.

I remember back in the days in the 20th Century when I was running Windows 98SE I had Trend PC-Cillin installed, (Not free) which failed to detect a particularly virulent virus which subsequently infected my system and disabled all protection. I installed a different paid-for solution, (I forget the name of it.) which the virus couldn’t disable and which detected and killed the virus. That goes to show that no antivirus solution; free or paid-for, is infallible.

I’ve always scanned with Lavasoft AdAware on a weekly basis anyway. – So if anything is missed by Avast! then AdAware; probably the best anti-malware solution I’ve seen, even topping Malware Bytes, will remove it.

What antivirus or security suite are you using? How would you rate it? Please comment.

Added 16th December 2009: Since I wrote this article a new free antivirus solution from Microsoft; namely Microsoft Security Essentials, has been released. In the opinion of myself and other testers; all other free antivirus solutions suck in comparison, and I strongly recommend that, if you’re not prepared to pay for an antivirus/malware solution, you download and install Microsoft Security Essentials

I was working on this blog on Monday 30th March 2009, having installed Apture on 28th March 2009, when suddenly I got a 404 error when I tried to go to a certain page. I checked the rest of the blog; which was initially for the most part working; but piece by piece started returning the same 404 error.

It was as if my blog was being taken down piece by piece.

I rang Fasthosts Customer Support to ask if they knew what was going on.

I was informed that a ticket had just been raised on the matter a few minutes ago; and that my blog had been taken offline by the abuse department. I tried to enquire further; but was told that an email was being drafted by the misuse department as I spoke explaining the issue. All I could get from technical support was a brief overview of the situation.

Ten minutes later I received the following email:

“Dear Sharron,

Re: Your website – kkomp.com

We have recently become aware that your website, kkomp.com, was causing performance problems on the shared webserver on which it was hosted. Our monitoring system detected a resource problem on the server and we are confident that that your site has been contributing to this issue. More details as to the nature of the problem will be found below.”

It gives the impression that they’re still using 386s with 8MB RAM as servers.

“As a result of this problem we have acted to move your website to our probation servers, these servers provide a separate hosting environment that we maintain specifically to allow our customers to diagnose and resolve performance issues with their sites. This action on our part gives you the opportunity to alter the site as required so that we can then consider moving it back to the standard hosting environment without affecting the performance of the other hosted sites.

While your site is hosted on our probation servers you are likely to experience performance below the levels that we normally provide to our shared hosting customers.

The move has meant that the IP address associated with your website has now changed to 2**.***.***.*** “

Thanks: I really needed that. ‘Much unappreciated!

“The problem is:

Your site was found running a number of php processes, using up excessive amounts of memory. At one point we suspected it on Sunday but were unable to gain sufficient evidence. However, today your site was caught running 5 php processes, each using up over 50MB of RAM and on a further check just now, we found 7 php processes using similar amounts of RAM each, plus a further 8 php processes using up around 28MB of RAM each.”

WOW: 574 MBs of RAM: – Big Deal! That’s on a 64-bit quad-core Linux server serving 26 customers I believe. That means that if everyone was using the same amount of memory as me there’d be 14 GB RAM fitted to cope with the load. Assuming that you have 4 RAM slots with 4 GB DDR2 cards in each then that’s 16GB RAM in total… But you clearly don’t have 16 GB  RAM fitted: Which means that you have 2GB sticks, fitted making a total of 8GB.

I find it astonishing that you’re too tight to spend less than £100 on 4 x 4GB sticks and fit them so that I can use the server properly, considering the fact that you bring in over £250 a month from that server alone!

Oh I almost forgot: It’s a British hosting company. What did I expect? Charity? Is this yet another example of rip-off Britain?

“In a shared hosting environment, this sort of RAM consumption can cause severe performance problems.”

It sounds a bit like British housing: We have 28 flats in your 20 x 12 metre-cubed tenement block, all sharing a single pipe. Since 45% of the residents are also geeks, please be considerate of the needs of others and don’t hog bandwidth or you’ll be disconnected. A limit of 1 GB per day at an expected speed of 512Kb/s is the maximum you should expect, despite the advertised 8Mb/s speeds. If you have any problem with this, RTFM including small-print.

“Beyond the description of the symptoms given above we are unable to offer assistance in diagnosis or resolution of the problem. We cannot advise you on how your site should be changed to resolve the problem. If we have been able to identify a particular script responsible for the problem then this information has been included in the notes above. If there is no indication of a particular script that we believe is causing the problem then you should assume that we have not been able to identify one. We will not take any further action to diagnose this problem.”

Ah I detect British Workman syndrome here:

“We didn’t find exactly what the problem was as it was time to clock off. You sort it out yourself, as we’re not getting paid for overtime.”

“While we recognise that this move may be inconvenient for you we would like to remind you that, when you opened your Fasthosts account, you agreed to be bound by our terms of service and to be responsible for the domains in your account. We feel that we have fulfilled our responsibility to you as a customer by providing this alternate hosting environment and giving you the opportunity to resolve the problem.”

What a weird way of going about things. Why not just email me and say “There’s a problem with your site overusing server resources. WE can’t be bothered to work out exactly what the problem is as we’re clocking off shortly. Please do our diagnostics for us and then fix it, or we’ll remove your blog from our servers.”

“We regret that we cannot allow your site to remain on the probation server for longer than 7 days. To prevent the suspension of your site you need to contact us within 7 days and tell us what steps you have taken to resolve the problem. If we do not hear from you within 7 days of the date of this email we will act to suspend your website and associated services including email. This step is not reversible and so it is imperative that you act quickly if you wish to continue to host your website with Fasthosts.

Should you require us to remove any unacceptable data and related services in order to resolve this problem we will require your explicit authorisation to do so.

On receipt of your reply, we will assess the situation again with the aim of moving your website back to the shared environment.

Once we are confident that the problem has been resolved we will move your website back to the shared hosting environment. Any further performance issues caused by your website will result in the site being permanently disabled and so we strongly advise that, in future, you actively monitor the resources used by the domains that you host with us.”

That seems a bit draconian!

For further information please refer to:

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/knowledge-base/?article_id=1115

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/companyinfo/termsofservice/

.
Regards,
***** *****
Misuse Team
Fasthosts Internet Ltd.”

Bloody heck: What a palaver!

Well it didn’t require a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist to guess what was causing the issue: Logically, since the Apture plugin was installed on Friday, and the issues had initially come to the fore on Sunday; just after I had configured a number of posts and pages to fully utilise the Apture plugin; it was logical to assume that the Apture plugin was the cause of the server memory usage issues. – So I removed it and rang up the host to check that the problem was resolved. There appeared to be no further problems, so the site went back onto the usual server.

I was getting 404s still; so I also asked them to check that the site was getting out. It was, so I flushed my DNS cache and everything returned to normal.

Now then; I want your opinions readers please: -

1) Do you think my host is tight-fisted and draconian, or is this normal behaviour for a web-host in your opinion?

2) Do you think; in your honest opinion, that I should find a better web-host?

3) If yes to #2; who would you recommend?

Please comment below.

As a PC builder and a geekette I love this kind of thing: -

Samsung took two quad core QX9775 processors – added 800MHz FBDIMM 4GB RAM, 24 SSDs totalling 6TB in a RAID setup…

The result was well hot: 2GB/second data transfer, all of M$ Office opened in the blink of an eye, the entire Windows start menu in under 20 seconds…

..And yet the Linux zealots say that Windows is slow: Not if you run it on the right machine it isn’t! OK some Linux distros will run happily on a 486…Yes; I’m not even going there: I wasn’t advertising Windows – I was going to show you this amazing machine.

Note the SSDs at the end: He gives them enough abuse to wreck some standard HDDs; and yet they all worked well afterwards. I look forwards to when SSDs come down in price to something near their spinning-disk predecessors.

Enough of my spiel: Watch the video; you’ll be enthralled:

Now that is just utterly incredible! – But it’s real.

…And just in case you missed it; here are all the design specs that they provide at the end very quickly: -

What this shows is that the major bottleneck on inferior computers is the hard-drive.

Yes you can speed up any PC by adding more RAM; to a point. – But look what haoppens when a decent PC has optimum access to fast drives.

This security-related article has been issued as an extra to the scheduled articles on kkomp.com .

Adobe are currently under attack by shedloads of malware and have recently become the number 1 target. They’ve just had to issue an urgent update for their flash player, after a remotely exploitable vulnerability resulting in code execution with user privileges was discovered. Read this security advisory.

Having read that; the best course of action is to upgrade your flash program to 10.0.22.87. If you can’t or won’t do that then there is also an update for Flash 9 to version 9.0.151.0 for Windows & Mac, and 9.0.152.0 for Linux. (For unsupported operating systems.) Please update all browsers that you are using and have Flash installed on.

Your system is always targeted. 

Also having vulnerabilities of script injection attack are RoboHelp7, 6, Server7,  and Server 6 on Windows.

At least Microsoft are in effect getting a breather. It seemed only a short while ago that Adobe were untouchable: But why should Microsoft have all the fun?

HP has decided that it won’t be launching its new Mini 1000 Mi Edition netbook in the UK; because, it says, the UK  consumer doesn’t want Linux.

Yes you read that right: HP thinks the average British consumer doesn’t want Linux. – Ubuntu Linux too.

Personally I know of many people who would give their right arm to have a netbook running Ubuntu Linux; but HP either know something I don’t or are just plain dumb.

The company has said that it won’t be launching the netbook in the UK; so not only don’t the British get another chance to learn to use and like Linux, but also they don’t get the netbook either.

HP is launching its new Mini 1000 Mi Edition netbook in the US, and it comes with a custom-made Ubuntu Linux operating system. The Brits, however, have to go without: No notebook and no Linux either.

HP is under the impression that UK customers are happy with the netbooks that are already available to buy in the Brit market, and have decided not to offer the Mini 1000 Mi Edition on this side of the pond.

Contrary to HP’s opinion however, other companies including publishers and retailers have seen a large amount of UK interest in Linux operating systems.

On the evidence of this; HP have shot themselves in the foot and will miss out on a rather good opportunity. – But that’s their problem to some extent. I wonder exactly what the UK Linux-users and prospective-UK-Linux-users are missing out on? There’s one way to find out: Import HP’s netbooks from America and sell them packaged with an AC mains voltage adapter in the UK.

Have I given someone ideas? I don’t even know whether it’s legal to do so under joint US / British trade regulations; neither will I be held responsible for anyone else’s possible contravention of any rules relating to them as a result of my suggested idea. I’m not an international trader and I can’t be expected to know much about it.

Nevertheless I see no reason why the UK should miss out on the product and Linux due to the fanciful whim of the manufacturer.

“Wait a minute there…” You interject: –

“You’re a self-admitted Wintard. What do you care about Linux?”

Yes it’s true that I prefer Windows personally. I also occasionally use Linux at times myself though, and I think that those who prefer Linux to Windows should all have equal rights to use it to the greatest possible extent; just as I think that those including myself who prefer Windows to Linux should also have the same rights; whether they live in the USA, Canada, the UK, Africa, India, Australia, or on Mars even: Wherever. I don’t think it fair that a company should deny a whole group of countries the right to own their product and use Linux on it if they wish to do so.

It’s neither in the interests of the Brits or HP to do so. OK I appreciate that they’re targeting what they believe to be a better marketplace; fair play to them, but in the interests of commerce it would appear as logical to target a market where the need is lesser and create a need, as it would be to serve the marketplace area where the extent of anticipated trade is better known. – Surely I’m right?

‘Anyone disagree? ‘Anyone strongly in agreement? Do comment.

RAM – It’s your computer’s processor’s instantly-accessible working-space. It’s the first place the CPU uses for storing information, notes, formulae, algorithms, data, logs, and anything else that it might want to access in a hurry. If there’s not enough room in the RAM then the processor has to utilise some space on the hard-disk to use in its place.

What’s the big deal with that then? Well to the processor the difference is like popping in to the local store next door – or driving to town, parking up, walking to the supermarket, waiting in a queue at the checkout to pay, walking back to the car, and driving back home again. Disk access takes ages compared to accessing the RAM, and it also causes extra wear and tear on the disk too.

On the evidence of that, then, we can say that the more RAM you have installed in your computer the better… Up to a point: If you’re using a 32-bit operating system then your computer will only see a limited amount of RAM. I know this for a fact. A customer of mine was adamant that he was going to have 4GB RAM fitted to his box that I was building, and that we’d agreed I was going to install 32-bit XP professional on; This despite the fact that I had told him that the operating system wouldn’t see all of the RAM if that much were installed. When completed the computer saw only 3.5 GB of RAM with its 32-bit operating system; and the onboard graphics used 250MB of that, leaving 3.25 GB with 500MB unseen. Click this link for a little more.

I’ll move on to 64-bit operating systems further down.

Both of my computers run 32-bit XP Professional and have 2GB RAM fitted. Only once when I was indexing and viewing a large file of over 2000 pictures; some over 1GB in size, have I ever run out of space in RAM. If you’re using a 32-bit operating system and using your computer for average general computing then 2GB is probably as much as you’ll ever need. With the low price of RAM sticks there days, though, it wouldn’t hurt to fit 3GB RAM if you have enough memory slots on the motherboard.

If you’re using a 64-bit operating system, though, it won’t hurt to stuff as much RAM as you can into your box. Assuming that your motherboard will support it; filling 4 memory slots with 4 x 4GB memory sticks – making a total of 16 GB – is fine. Why waste memory slots? They may as well be used if they can be used.

64-bit operating systems have the capability to address much more RAM. How much? Well it appears that nobody can actually agree on exactly how much: Nobody I know anyway.

I’ve heard one person claim that it can take an infinite amount of RAM – Which is wrong; there is a limit. I’ve heard someone else still claim that it will only see a terabyte of RAM. I personally calculated it at several terabytes. Whichever is correct, it’s fairly academic anyway: I don’t see a motherboard anywhere at the moment that’ll take 250 X 4GB RAM sticks (1TB). Such a board would be rather large: Larger than most people would like anyway, I think it would be safe to assume. The most RAM I’ve ever heard of anyone using in a single box under a 64-bit environment, up to time of writing, is 32GB on a Mac. That is used for doing a shedload of video editing/broadcasting, in addition to running an entire online business. Do you have more than that fitted to your computer? Please say so if you do.

There are a few rules to fitting RAM, other than fitting the right type of RAM, e.g. DDR, DDR2, DDR3, etc. Let’s take a look at some of them: =

Most motherboards these days have dual-channel architecture. This is analogous to the dual-core processor in a way; except for the preference that at least 2 individual sticks of RAM should be used. There should be no problems using only 1, but system performance will be enhanced by using at least 2. It’s a better idea to use an even number of sticks; though I’ve not heard of any major issues in using an odd number of sticks.

As you may or may not know; there are different speeds of RAM: For instance; one of my machines is fitted with DDR2 533MHz RAM, whereas the other one, which I’m writing this on, is fitted with DDR2 667MHz RAM. What’s the difference? The difference is the frequency that they operate at. What difference does the RAM speed make to system performance? A very small and almost unnoticeable difference; but something rather than nothing. If I was using DDR3 RAM in one of them then the difference would be noticeable; and so would the cost, as DDR3 is more expensive than DDR2, added to which I’d need to replace the motherboard to be able to use DDR3, as my memory slots will only accommodate DDR2 sticks.

So what happens if I were to mix up the sticks and fit a 533 and a 667 MHz stick to one of the computers? The answer is that the RAM would run at the speed of the slowest stick; in this case 533MHz. – So yes you can mix the speeds; but the result will be that all the sticks will run at the speed of the slowest stick.

How much RAM can I get away with NOT using?

I’ve run XP Home on a Pentium 1 processor with 32MB PC133 RAM before now; and it worked. – ‘Just that it took half an hour to boot, thrashed the disk like crazy, and ran slower than the UK railways.

I’ve run XP Home on 250MB DDR RAM in a box with an AMD Sempron 32-bit single-core CPU. It was slow, and the hard disk was very busy. I installed a second 250MB DDR stick and everything worked reasonably well; on “tick-over” that is: It wasn’t 100% happy when doing intensive jobs and took its time over some operations.

XP Pro 32-bit works fine with a dual-core processor and 1GB DDR2 RAM. I like to have 2GB installed as there are occasions when the system needs it. I have nVidia turbocharged graphics cards; which borrow up to 186 MB of it if the display needs it too.

Vista loves RAM; and it’ll greedily utilise loads of it just showing the desktop. It’s a well-known resource-hogger; so if you’re running Vista I’d say 2GB minimum for 32 or 64-bit.

Linux – depending on the distro – will run on almost anything. In the case of operating systems like Ubuntu, however, I’d recommend a minimum of 1GB.

Mac OSX – A very versatile *nix – based 64-bit OS. With that one I’d say the more the merrier…And that goes for any 64-bit OS too in all honesty. – It depends what you’re using it for.

That’s about it for this article: I think I’ve RAMmed the message home enough for now. – That’s enough PUNishment. If you have any thoughts, disagreements, views, whatever, then please comment below.

- From your desktop no less.

If I were to mention the phrase;

“App for uploading pics to Facebook”,

- you’d probably reply, “Facebook Photo Uploader”.

Very square indeed. There is another one however, that might even be a little more versatile.

It’s a Java-based app.

– For those crying;

“I don’t want to install Java; it’s bloat.”

I always install Java on a new build; whether I need it straight away or not. It’s harmless, and may well be useful in the future, even if not at present. – ‘Same with .net Framework, and of late Adobe Air too..

Make sure you have the latest Java runtime environment installed. This’ll work on Java 5 or 6+. It’s called Bloom.

You can tag photos with it, upload them to an existing album, or create a new album and upload to it, and you can also view your friend’s pics with it too.

It’s not platform specific, so whether you run osX, Windows, or Linux, provided you have Java installed you’re in clover.

You might just discover that it’s bloomin’ good.

Get it here at antaki.ca. 

Latest version released 20th January 2009.

In the past I’ve written about hard-disk failures on this and/or other blogs. A hard-disk failure is a pain in the proverbial normally, especially if you forgot to make regular data backups. Even if you’re running a RAID configuration using hot-swappable SATA disks a disk-failure causes unwanted hassle and replacement-expense that one could do without.

Imagine having a single 1.5 terabyte disk with over a terabyte of data on it that fails! You’ve made a backup; but think of the time involved in getting your machine working again. If you have a disk of this size; in fact anything bigger than 500MB, then I would advise the following: -

Either:

1) Have a smaller drive, 250GB or suchlike, fitted in addition to the massive-sized drive, on which resides your operating system and its immediately-related files: ( e.g. drive C: . The huge drive could be drive D: for example. ) . Also take regular backups of both drives.

2) Run a RAID configuration in RAID 1 or greater using 2 or more SATAII large disks (>500MB) of equal size. Take regular backups.

OR 3) A combination of both. (Inc. regular backups.)

Reasons for 1):

If your operating system screws up, gets a virus infection, or you just decide to upgrade it; it’ll be much simpler to have all the files and folders concerned separately contained on a single, smaller drive, while the massive drive exists independently of the system drive and is used for storage alone.

Whilst it’s true that there’s nothing whatsoever to prevent an invading piece of malware attacking the massive drive at the same time as the smaller C: drive, the computer is able to operate with a reinstalled operating system on C: while you are cleaning your massive data store or formatting it and reinstalling from a backup made prior to the malware infection: hence less down-time than there would have been if you’d had to reinstall all your massive amounts of data plus your OS on a single drive.

Reasons for 2):

A RAID 1 or greater configuration will automatically provide some form of backup, so that should a drive fail, or data corruption occur on one drive, there’ll always be a second drive installed as backup. This type of configuration will prevent data corruption to a greater extent, and, in the case of a drive failure, will allow you to hot-swap the faulty drive for a new one with minimal if any down-time.

In the case of a virus infection however, this approach can be problematic as the entire contents of a terabyte or more will need to be cleaned or reinstalled from a backup made prior to infection. – Thus causing a problem of down-time.

This brings me on to the last section:

Reasons for 3):

Firstly, we never properly specified what 3) actually is exactly: We just said that it’s a combination of 1) and 2). Let’s be a little more specific: -

The setup is as follows:

2 or more x 250 GB or similar drives in a RAID 1 or greater configuration containing the OS and associated files.

2 or more x 500GB+ drives in a RAID 1 or greater configuration for storage of your other files.

Most motherboards only have a single RAID controller built into them. The above involves 2 RAID configurations, each on a separate RAID controller. Fortunately the remedy; that is installing a separate RAID controller, isn’t that difficult or expensive.

A VIA VT6421 card is the cheapest option, and fits into a spare PCI slot. Silicon Image also have a RAID controller card that fits into that little-used PCIe x1 slot. Both have their own onboard BIOS although they both require an extra driver.

In the case of the Silicon Image card you’ll find this on the installation CD that is packed with it. It has drivers for pretty much every known OS included on it, including a multitude of flavours of Linux.The VIA VT6421 driver can probably be installed with or from Windows XP; but if not it also comes with a driver CD too.

So having got our RAID controller card fitted we start off (– Assuming that this is a new build.) by fitting 2 or more identical 250GB drives, connecting them to the motherboard’s RAID controller, and configuring then in RAID 1 or greater, depending upon the number of drives, in tandem with installing the operating system on this configuration.#

Having got the machine working we now fit 2 or more identical 500GB+ drives and, ensuring that the RAID controller card’s drivers are installed and working properly, we connect the big drives’ SATA connector leads to the RAID controller’s SATA ports and reboot…

Now you’ll see 2 drives in My Computer: Drive C: , which is the set of 250GB system drives in RAID configuration containing the operating system and associated files, and Drive *: , which is the set of big drives in RAID configuration.

The drawback of this method is cost: Let’s assume that you configure 2 x 250GB drives in RAID1 , as well as 2 x 1TB drives in RAID 1. That’s going to cost you about £120 to £160 extra to just having a single 1 TB HDD installed. (Including the cost of the extra RAID controller card.)

Question: Is it worth it?

For the peace of mind and the reduced hassle when it does screw up then I’d say it probably does balance out with the extra cost, and is worth doing. – Particularly if you have loads of data that is going to cause problems if it can’t be accessed instantly.

Do I use this system? I don’t have enough data on disk currently to justify it. As my CD and DVD collection (Music and data.) begins to degrade with time though, it’ll eventually end up on disk to avoid it being binned along with the failing optical disks. – So yes I’d imagine I will eventually. Probably by that time I’ll be using new computers, most likely running Windows 7, maybe dual-booted with XP (?).

Should you use this system? Only you can decide that. Please comment and tell us why you’d use it or why you wouldn’t.

Do you find that, as time goes by, the number of files and folders on your desktop accumulates to such an extent that there’s just no longer any room for any more?

I’ve been subjected to this problem myself, and although I’ve grouped the numerous individual files into folders, I’ve found that eventually the number of separate folders clutters up the desktop and eventually limits space to the point of overcrowding.

Obviously there is no necessity to have all these files/folders on the desktop; but it’s handy to do so. Even if the folders themselves aren’t actually on the desktop, I probably have a shortcut to the folder in question; and that means another icon cluttering the desktop.

…But with the multi-faceted Windows OS there must be a solution; and low and behold there is: Toolbars.

Toolbars? Yes, you read that right: Toolbars.

In all Windows operating systems, (And also with many Linux operating systems too.) there’s an easy method of turning folders into toolbars. The problem is that there’s only four sides to a screen, so you don’t really want to have loads of taskbars; although you can actually stack taskbars. More on that later.

Above you see my desktop; and you’ll notice a toolbar on each side. The one on the right is what I call the "Files and Shortcuts Toolbar": It contains links to files and shortcuts to files unsurprisingly. The one on the right I call the "Extras Toolbar": It contains everything else, including some shortcuts to programs.

How on earth did I create those? Simplicity itself: Let’s create another toolbar. I’ll talk you through the creation process step by step:-

We start by right-clicking the desktop and hovering over "New" in the menu that appears. Click on "Folder".

Voila! Un folder appeareth.

You’ll notice that I have lots of text files strewn about the desktop. Let’s clear those up and put them in their own toolbar.

First we’ll rename the folder:-

That’ll do it: ‘Not very imaginative, but quite realistic.

Now we collect all those text files, and drag-and-drop them into that folder we just renamed:-

Like that… Hang on: Where have those two toolbars gone? Oh they’re still there; they’re just hiding: I’ll tell you what I mean further on.

So now we try to drag the folder off the screen on the side where we want the toolbar to be. In this case the top of the screen: Left-click on the folder, drag it to the top. – Half of it is off the screen. Let go the left mouse-button, and a toolbar appeareth! A toolbar with all the text-files in it.

If you don’t want the name of every folder to appear next to the folder, taking up space; just right-click on an empty portion of the toolbar and click "show text". If you don’t want the name of the taskbar to appear on it; just right-click on an empty portion of the toolbar and click "show title".

Finally, if you want to make the taskbar thinner; position the mouse-pointer on the very edge of the taskbar so that a line with an arrow at each end appears, right click and hold while you drag the edge of the taskbar to the size you want. The contents of the taskbar will rearrange according to the space that you allow. Tidy up the remaining icons on the desktop and Bob’s your uncle; a tidier desktop.

Remember that I said that the other two taskbars were hiding? This one can hide too: Right-click on a blank area of the taskbar and click "Auto-hide". Also click "Always on top"; otherwise you won’t be able to see the taskbar when you bring it out of hiding as there will be a window on top of it most probably.

I think a video is called for here. OK you asked for it. Please forgive the video quality; I just threw it together, literally right now. I used anything I could lay my hands on to make it: I taped the webcam to the top of a curtain pole to get the right height for the screen even. I’ve not produced any videos as such up until now; except a couple for private viewing among friends. – And you can put that dirty mind away right now!¬

Who was it that commented: "I like reading your blog: It makes me laugh so much."? Well get ready to crease up, as Bodgit & Scarper Studios proudly present… This:-

You’ll notice that my clock was a little slow. – Like 20 years.

It gives you some idea of what I mean I hope, if it plays OK. (Remind me to sack the focus-puller.)

There is just one snag though; that being that the file corresponding to the toolbar has to remain on the desktop: If you move it to another file you get a blank toolbar.

Beggars can’t be choosers though. Having extra toolbars is very handy when using apps such as Windows Live Writer, as I am right now: I don’t have to shrink down the app to the taskbar and clear the desktop to find the file or shortcut I want: I just look in a toolbar and click. Easy-peasy.

Computing made simple; courtesy of kkomp.com.

That’s your lot for this post. – ‘Til next time.

Adios amigos.

Adverts time:

Think yourselves lucky: I could have plastered this post with ads.

oops!

Addendum: It appears that there is at least one other vid of the same nature dealing with this subject:-

‘Nice to see that I’m not alone.

Also see this article.

“Windows 7 basically takes Windows one step closer to the design aesthetic of the Mac, where form is valued over function. I’m not sure this is the right strategy. Simplicity, taken in isolation, may seem like a good idea. But I’m afraid that in Windows 7, Microsoft is sacrificing too much in its bid to be more like Apple. And it’s the users of Windows who will pay the price.”

- So says blogger Paul Thurrott in his article “Windows 7: Simple Vs. Easy” 

Me; I’m not really in the know: I haven’t even seen the pre-beta. – But I want to highlight this suggestion that Microsoft are trying to make Windows more like Mac osX.

ZDnet’s Mary Joe Foley commented in a part of her response to Thurrott’s article:

“If I wanted a Mac-like environment, I’d buy a Mac. I want an computing environment that helps me get my work done and doesn’t require a how-to manual to figure out which icon does what. Maybe Microsoft could introduce “Windows 7 Luddite Edition” for those of us who value function over form?”

I suggest that you read the two articles right through, and then, if you would be so kind, state your opinion by means of a comment below. What I’m asking is; do you think Microsoft are in danger of making Windows too like Mac osX? Also do you think that they are attempting to present Windows 7 as a simpler-to-use operating system by hiding the complexities; in other words sacrificing function to promote form?

I would imagine that, even in 7, it’s possible to access all the usual functions from the command line, even if those functions may be buried. Not all users are actually familiar with the command line though – After all this is Windows, not Linux.

I miss the point maybe; or is there some benefit to be gained by encouraging the stupid and lazy to become stupider and lazier by hiding things they can’t understand and can’t be bothered to learn about?

Open=Source takes one in the eye as Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.B  secretly works as a Firefox plugin and steals bank login details on any of 103 domains belonging to mainly non-US banks. BitDefender identifies ChromeInject as “…the first malware that targets Firefox.”

Fortunately the infection rate thusfar is low; but there’s always a chance of this type of thing escalating. The false plugin works by running a JavaScript and a Windows executable file: Seemingly this trojan only affects Firefox running in Windows; Linux and Mac are most likely safe, at least from this version of this trojan. How long this will be the case is anyone’s guess.

Is this the start of a long-running malware campaign against Firefox. Will a plethora of variations of this trojan be targeted at Firefox by the malware writers? Judging by previous form I would expect that to be the case. What would you suggest? Do you agree with me, or do you think that this is just a one-off?

First-off let me state that this is not a how-to article: It’s an analytical article designed to prompt discussion, (If anybody can be bothered to comment.) on the subject.

In this Twenty-First Century I’ve tried pretty much everything regarding partitioning; and to be honest, I don’t see much point to it, other than if one is intending to run a dual-boot. (Linux and Windows installed on the same disk in different partitions, for example.) Even then I prefer to use a different physical drive for either operating system.

Partitioning was used primarily back in the early days of personal computers, when Windows and Mac operating systems, as well as at times the hard-disk controller architecture itself, were unable to recognise, and to interact with, a partition greater than 2GB in size. Some hard-drives were around that were larger than 4GB, so it was necessary to partition those. These days most operating systems can handle partitions of 2 terabytes or more. (One day we’ll think of a terabyte as a small disk size no doubt. I have a 760MB hard-drive floating around somewhere: Once upon a time even that was considered a massive-sized disk.)

I’ve tried the method of having many partitions: One for the Windows swap-file, one for the operating system itself, one for active programs, one for storage… Too confusing; and the operating system finds it so too, leading to unnecessary corruption. In addition the hard drive encounters more wear, having to keep changing the arm between partitions, and as a consequence system response time is increased.

Some people think that by keeping the operating system on a separate partition they can just reinstall Windows if the operating system goofs and carry on as normal. They’re forgetting one crucial factor, however: The Windows registry won’t re-register their programs which exist in a different partition on install. In fact the new operating system won’t even see their existing programs on another partition as it installs. The only true way to preserve things as they were is by regularly backing up to a source external to the computer; such as another computer, NAS box, external hard-drive, or online backup.

Putting the swap-file onto a different partition isn’t that good an idea either: Head-travel and hard-drive wear come into play as the arm swings wildly between partitions, causing a reduction in response time too.

Some think that if they put the operating system on a drive other than C: it’ll be safe from malware as malware writers target their wares at the C: drive. Utter crap. Get decent protection and learn how to use a computer while staying safe online is the solution to that; not trying to outwit the malware writers.

I have 2 computers: Both run XP and both currently have a single hard-drive. On the main computer, the one I’m writing this on, the drive is not partitioned. On the other one, the backup computer as well as the computer I’ll be watching TV on from now, having just installed a TV card, the hard-drive is partitioned into two. This is from the days when the drive was in a different (now dismantled) computer and I was playing around with Ubuntu. I use the second partition for storage and for backing up files, and the first one for everything else: Basically the second partition is for inactive files and folders, while the first partition is active.

Windows; at least the versions available within the last ten years, is designed to all be put onto a single partition, and it’s good at managing itself on a single partition. ‘Spread it across multiple partitions and it gets funny, becomes harder to maintain, uses more resources, slows down, corrupts easier, and wastes time. I’m not anywhere near as well experienced with any other operating system as I am with Windows; so I’m mainly referring to Windows in this article. I’d imagine, though, that the situation is the same or similar with other operating systems too.

Your comments are invited.

On October 10th 2008 I stated the following:

"In general I think that most computer users are too lax don’t take security seriously enough.

I am fairly certain that the number of machines that are still unprotected by any kind of firewall is fairly big.

I am fairly certain that the percentage of machines unprotected by any kind of anti-virus and anti-spyware software is quite high: Higher than you’d imagine.

I am fairly certain that the number of people who have anti-virus and anti-virus software installed, but whose databases have never been updated is quite colossal.

I am fairly certain that the percentage of machines that have not once taken any update to or Windows components is probably in the twenties.

I am also fairly certain that there are a number of people who’ll click on links or open attachments from unknown sources without giving it a second thought."

A new survey by the UK Government’s Get Safe Online Campaign allows me to put some actual figures to those statements:-

Overall almost half of UK internet users fail to keep their security software up-to-date.

48% do not update their anti-virus software frequently enough to ensure it remains effective.

47% do not have website authentication software to protect against phishing attacks.

23% do not have any protection against spyware.

As a result cybercrime is on the increase, especially phishing, according to the campaign.

23% of those people surveyed said that they or someone they knew was the victim of a phishing attack this year, 2008. In 2007 the figure was only 8%.

According to Tony Neate, managing director of Get Safe Online: “If internet users invest a relatively small amount of time and money in ensuring they are fully protected and up-to-date, the risk of such financial loss is almost negligible.”

‘Typical couldn’t-care-less "Der I’m a Brit so I don’t need none ov this crap" attitude. What is wrong with people? Are they really so unthinking and irresponsible in the UK? Unfortunately the figures seem to speak for themselves. I’m still getting visitors to this blog who are using Windows ME and 9x. Read this article – I wasn’t joking; these operating systems are a security risk, even if you do apply all the patches available.

"Oh who’d want to bother hacking Windows 9x? It’s outdated and Microsoft don’t have anything to lose ." Bad answer; you’re missing the point: The attacks aren’t so much virus and other malware attacks by criminal Linux zealots designed to discredit Microsoft these days. They are designed to rip off the public in any way possible, to steal money from you and me. Criminals launch malware designed to target old Microsoft operating systems still in use which aren’t patched against the latest threats. Your old relic machine running Windows ME/9x is probably being used right now as a malware relay and/or a remote server under the control of a criminal gang; and I also bet you that those criminals have any of your security details left on that computer too.

There’s no need to buy a new computer necessarily: If your machine will run Windows XP, or Ubuntu Linux even if you can’t afford a second-hand copy of XP, then all you need do is change the operating system. I’ll write an article at some point on this.

Please please please peoples; for the sake of all internet users, follow these simple rules: Yes it’ll take a little extra time; but you and everybody else will reap the rewards of doing so:-

1. Ensure that you have antivirus software installed and that it is updated daily. If you can’t or don’t want to pay for it then download Avast! Free Edition. Avast free edition includes antispyware. It updates automatically and will inform you audibly when it has done so. (Male American voice: Unchangeable.)

2. Get website authentication software. (Microsoft have this built into Internet Explorer 7 and above.)

3. Get spyware protection. Avast! free antivirus has built-in spyware protection. Some antivirus programs do not. (If your antivirus program is more than a year old it needs changing as it’s unable to detect or cope with current threats.)

I’ll be blunt here: If you can’t be bothered to stick to these simple rules then I hope you get scammed/robbed; after which you might just take some care to abide by them. If you can’t be bothered then you deserve anything and everything you get. Despite that I suggest you do the sensible thing and ensure that your online security is 100% – Before it’s too late for someone else; or more importantly before it’s too late for you.

In short – Everyone needs them – That includes YOU!

I have seen people using an old computer running Windows ME without any firewall, antivirus, antispyware; totally unpatched. I was so shocked that I commented out loud about having found the local computer virus maternity unit: The owner, who was in the nextdoor room, came scurrying in with a look of puzzlement combined with anger on her face.

This person had been merrily using a totally unprotected computer for years and spreading viruses to all and sundry across the internet for years; totally unaware of any threat to herself or others.

"Oh but I only use it online about an hour a day." She exclaimed.

– How thoughtful of you. NOT!

Some computer users I’ve encountered have no idea what a firewall is. Others have said that they think they don’t need antivirus software because they only have a dialup connection. Still others have antivirus software but didn’t realise that it had to be updated. And yet others even have complained to me that the security bug fix that "Microsoft" emailed to them didn’t do anything but slow their machine down.

The worst instance was a person who had had their machine "upgraded"- Allegedly from a single-core to a dual-core processor, and had supposedly moved from a 32-bit to a 64-bit installation of Windows XP, which they’d paid a sizable amount of money for the privilege of having carried out. On my examination the operating system disk packaging didn’t shed any light on the question of exactly what this person was running, as there was only a clear case with a home-recorded CD inside it. The contents of this CD included a virus that had been rewritten to defeat the Microsoft Genuine Advantage software and reported a legitimate key. It soon became clear that this was an unprotected, non-updated, unpatched pirated copy of Windows Vista, which was being run on a machine that was hardly capable of running it:

The "upgraded" "dual-core" processor was a 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 single-core processor and the RAM it was using was still the old DDR rather than DDR2. The motherboard was a rather ancient Asus board made to run the early 1st generation Athlon 64s, which was what it was still doing. The system was riddled with viruses and malware: In fact I was surprised that it was still running. The operating system was totally unprotected and all the software that they were running was pirated also.

Both the cases I’ve written about lived within 15 miles of me, and are just two worst-case examples of the many similar cases I’ve seen that close in proximity to where I live: The possibilities from those statistics frighten me no end. I would estimate that there are nearly a million internet-connected users in England alone who are not using any online protection and whose computers are virus and botnet nurseries.

On the basis of that estimate alone it should be fairly obvious to you why a computer needs protection.

In general I think that most computer users are too lax don’t take security seriously enough.

I am fairly certain that the number of machines that are still unprotected by any kind of firewall is fairly big.

I am fairly certain that the percentage of machines unprotected by any kind of anti-virus and anti-spyware software is quite high: Higher than you’d imagine.

I am fairly certain that the number of people who have anti-virus and anti-virus software installed, but whose databases have never been updated is quite colossal.

I am fairly certain that the percentage of machines that have not once taken any update to Windows or Windows components is probably in the twenties.

I am also fairly certain that there are a number of people who’ll click on links or open attachments from unknown sources without giving it a second thought.

Owning a computer could be likened to owning a car: Both require maintenance, both need attention, both need care when using them. When you drive a car you don’t just get in and drive off taking any route that you fancy. There are do’s and don’ts; there are things you can do and things you shouldn’t do:

For instance if you don’t stick to the roads and drive cross-country you’re likely to end up stuck in a rut or broken down in the middle of nowhere. If you try to drive through tree trunks you’ll end up with a busted car. (I know this: I didn’t try to drive through a tree, but I lost it on a corner and hit one once. In that instance I discovered that evolution fashioned trees in a stronger design than Ford fashioned cars.) If you drive recklessly you’ll end up hurting yourself financially and/or physically. Maybe you’ll end up hurting others too.

The same is true when using a computer: if you don’t bother to maintain it and just "drive" it in any old fashion you’ll get reputation and you’ll end up with a computer that’s slow, faulty, and full of malware. That malware will spread from your computer to other users because that is what it is made to do. If a person doesn’t use anti-virus then their computer will become a virus nursery and infect other computers: That is carelessness and selfishness on their part. likewise with anti-spyware, firewall, etc.

People do exactly that though: they don’t bother, they don’t care. They might not mind having a machine full of malware; but other people don’t want that. As a result, we have botnets, spam, and constant virus and spyware attacks.

My advice to every computer user – Whether they run Windows, Linux, or Mac; but especially if they run Windows, is:

Windows is a targeted operating system; but other operating systems are by no means immune to attack.

Everyone needs education: That includes computer users. What do YOU think?

This report has been the big rumour of the day today; as you may have heard – Setting the gossip lines, blogs, and Twitter, alight with chat:

Apple says the Steve Jobs Heart Attack Report Is Not True.

Of course it’s not true: For one to have a heart attack one must first posses a heart.

Jobsweh may posses an organ that keeps the blood circulating throughout his body; but any outgoing emotion from that organ appears to have been stemmed by his control-freak nature and love of profit at any cost.

Using tactics of mass-mind-control akin to those used on the German people during and just before the second-world war by Hitler and the Third Reich; Jobs has conned the world into buying his substandard products in a hypnotic marketing ploy using deceptive yet convincing tactics to deceive the minds of the masses into thinking that anything bearing the Apple name is the best thing since sliced bread.

What is a Mac? A Mac is a PC with a sturdy chassis and an inflated price tag. What is an iPhone? An iPhone is a small programmable handheld computer/phone with a weak non-user-replaceable battery that is remote-controllable and block-able at the behest of Steve Jobs. What is OSX? Well-developed Linux with its own special flavour – No more and no less.

So an Apple system is no more a sturdy PC made of Apple-approved components in an Apple-defined design configuration running a specialised flavour of Linux called OSX written by Apple, all of which costs twice as much as a normal PC running a normal Linux distro. Maybe this Apple system’s overall operation is slightly better than average; provided that all software is approved by and provided by Steve Jobs at an inflated price. It’s not anything different from the norm in reality: It’s the ultimate con.

Is Steve Jobs worried that he’s taking the public for a bunch of mugs. No; not even an iota of shame or guilt. Does he care that he’s selling a PC as a specialised improved type of technological evolution?

Having said that though – I must admit that I definitely do admire him for his unbelievable nerve. Not even Bill Gates with all his wealth and genius pulled such a massive confidence-trick on so many to get where he is today.

If you’ve seen the 1970/1980s BBC TV comedy series “Only Fools and Horses” then you may remember the episode where Del and Rodney are bottling tap water and selling it wholesale for a profit as “Peckham Spring”. ‘Far-fetched you think? No more far-fetched than Del Boy Jobs selling a PC running Unix as a Mac at an inflated price. No more far-fetched than a mentally-unstable Corporal putting on a display of authority and conning an entire nation into following him and his Third Reich.

The same old confidence-trick in another guise is still just the same old confidence-trick. As Shakespeare wrote in his famous play Romeo and Juliet:-

“That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Despite a strong wind from the NASDAQ with the potential to dislodge Apple and send it tumbling as an economic drop-out; the company has had its own windfall in the States recently according to figures released by US market watcher NPD: The figures indicate that Apple made an impressive 20% of all retail notebook computer sales during July and August of this year, 2008.

The MacBook range of laptops appear to have gone down well with parents buying for their kids for the new school year, as well as with students. I perceive the dollar-signs lighting up so bright in the eyes of Jobsweh; god of all things Apple, that they nearly cause a fire as he curls his talons around his increasing capital assets:-

The 20% figure is for stock turnover. The revenue percentage of market share is 35%: Whoever suggested that Jobsweh had priced himself out of the market?

Of course, as I mentioned in another article, the MacBook line is due to be refreshed about now or in the very near future – Yet even just clearing the old stock has set the cash-registers ringing merrily across America.

The “anti-Vista lobby”; IOW a large percentage of (ex-)Windows users, must have helped account for the unexpected fortune of the company – switching from Windows notebooks now mainly only available pre-installed with Vista, to MacBooks with OSX installed. Despite the relatively high-costs involved it seems the American public on the whole feel that it’s a price worth paying.

Can this boom continue or is it merely a lucky blip? Despite the economic misfortune that now bites the world economy, it appears that Apple have had such an effective marketing campaign that consumers will still buy MacBooks despite the extra price tag and the cheaper Linux-bearing alternatives.

It would be wise for Apple to drop their profit-margin somewhat on the upcoming ranges though, as competition is still rife and economic future trends would appear to favour lower-cost devices. If the price of the new lines are right then Apple have the chance to make another massive windfall, rather than breaking where their growth is stemmed, and dropping from the money-tree to become fodder for the foragers and scavengers of recession.

Do you think Steve Jobs (Jobsweh) can resist overpricing his wares?

Prologue Rabbit:

Quite some time ago – 2 years plus; I’m not exactly sure how long, I got an invite from a friend to join Facebook. I’d heard a lot about it but wasn’t really into social networking at that time: Times were good economically, and I was concentrating on getting a computer-building enterprise running. I wasn’t that fussed on spending hours posting my life online and getting chatted-up by lonely losers using the internet as a last-ditch attempt at getting a date with anyone they could find.

Anyway I eventually gave Facebook a try – And I found it so sucky at the time that after not long I closed down my account in protest. I kept a MySpace account going but abandoned it and forgot the login details.

More than two years later; having become a Twitter, FriendFeed, etc, user – I found that everyone and anyone was using Facebook. Yesterday I made up my mind to give them a second chance and opened an account: The new look Facebook is so much better, more user-friendly, and functional.

The Guts:

…And so to the purpose of this article; having released and dispensed with the drivel:-

I’m going to be honest and say that I’m not an iPhone owner or user. What? A geek without an iPhone?!: Dracula without fangs, a tree not made of wood! Well, approve or disapprove; I’m a Wintard and I use Windows Mobile on my mobile phone supplied by BT, and some Linux variant on my Sony Ericsson X750i, I think it is. I simply don’t see the point of buying an iPhone, and I have possible gripes with Apple – But that’s another story. Since I don’t own an iPhone I can’t tell you much about this App from experience: So I’m going to cheat and quote a little from TechCrunch.com:

“While previous releases of the Facebook application supported the News Feed feature, only mobile photo uploads and status updates were displayed. In version 2.0, the News Feed has been completely overhauled to match item-for-item with that of the site itself, throwing news posts, relationship and interest updates, and all photo uploads into the mix. Furthermore, users are now able to comment on any given bit of news, or limit the feed to only the categories they wish to peruse.”

Ah what the heck: Click the link below and read:

Facebook Rolls Out Version 2.0 of their iPhone Application

Yes; maybe it’s not standard practice to just hand over to another blog mid-story: A little deviation from the norm won’t hurt anyone nevertheless; plus I’ve done Michael Arrington, Greg Kumparak, and the rest of the TC crew a favour.

…And Finally…

Something else that’s hitting the headlines is the House of Representatives’  Web site – Which has been overwhelmed this week by a tidal-wave of visitors trying to e-mail their Congressperson and/or download George Bush’s Financial Bailout Bill that the House rejected. The site saw three to four times its normal traffic yesterday, 29th September,, according to Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the House Chief Administrative Officer.

That’ll teach ‘em to vote “no”: DDOS ‘em as punishment, lol.

And now; Some advertising:

Years ago back in 2002 I needed a new computer. At that time I wasn’t building computers; I was a software geekette, and I was still learning about hardware. My old 233MHz Cyrix processor on a PC Chips PC100 motherboard  was becoming  too slow even for Windows 98. I wanted to move up to Windows XP; but wasn’t happy about trying it on my existing system.

Like I said; I wasn’t a hardware geekette, but I knew what to look out for; so I did the usual British thing and headed for the PC World store.

I parked outside in their car park and entered the store through the plush sliding automatic doors; went to the back of the store, and started looking at what they had to offer. It wasn’t that bad; but I only had a choice of around 15 different computers; each with its own special deal.

I felt eyes on me and noticed a salesman hovering not far away pretending to dust a shelf. I wandered over to the pre-SP2 stacks of Windows XP Professional CDs: £99! – Extortion! I was going to have to cut a deal here.

To cut a long story short I left the store that day with a computer made by Medion, running a 2.8GHz 1st generation P4, (A cutting-edge processor at the time.) 512MB RAM, (Standard at the time was 250 to 512MB) and 32MB onboard graphics. (Again standard for the time 32-64MB) I also had a ton of crap freebie software thrown in, and the tower came with a wheel-mouse, reasonable stereo speakers, ( – Which I still posses.) OK keyboard, Canon inkjet printer – Which I got them to upgrade from the cheap-looking Hewlett-Packard printer that originally came with the deal, and a free Windows XP Professional CD.

How I got that free was a bit of a crafty deal: You see PC World stores in the UK make a huge percentage of their money selling warranties on their goods and earning from the commissions from that; and therefore the salesman wasn’t going to let me get away without buying one. (All their customers complain about the warranty that they’re virtually forced to buy with their new computer, and which usually costs around as much again; but still they keep going back to them like wasps to a jamjar.) I cut a deal in which I agreed to buy the 5-year-warranty that they were pushing on me on condition that they gave me a better printer than the one in the bundle, and that they threw in a free XP Professional CD. I was trying to get their top-price scanner free with the deal too; but I had to drop that in compromise.

I was happy at the time, except that the box was the wrong colour and I’d had to give up the chance of a model with 64MB onboard graphics to get the model with the printer in the bundle. 2 years later, and with the price of RAM still high, I wanted to upgrade to 1GB RAM and found that there were 2 x 250MB sticks already in the box; which meant I’d have to replace rather than fit 2 more as there were only 2 slots. I also wanted to upgrade to 128MB graphics and did that instead with a Radeon PCI graphics card. I also wanted to upgrade the CPU to the latest 3.06MB P4 with hyperthreading; but that was out of the question.

2006, and I’d just finished my electronics course and gained 2 certificates. I’d also killed two birds with one stone by messing about with computer hardware/software in the computer course classroom which was adjacent to the electronics lab; much to the tutor’s annoyance, as he had to keep coming over and getting me to attend his impromptu lectures. – You could therefore say that I was trained in computer hardware also; although without a certificate.

By this time my computer was in its old age and was starting to show it; although I’d kept it going reasonably well. I was in a mind to attempt my first full-build – I had the know-how; I just needed the parts. The immediate objective; though, was flashing the BIOS on my existing box: I’d done it before on that box, and I’d done it a number of times at college; all successfully. This BIOS flash didn’t go to plan however: A power-spike during the process – I was economising by not having a UPS in-circuit – fried the BIOS chip: All I got from it was a blank screen and a continuous beep…And it was a week before Christmas too! I phoned the warranty company and got a number unobtainable tone. PC World informed me that the warranty company had gone out of business and that the company that had taken over were now closed until the New Year. – I couldn’t wait until then for a computer. I know; I’ll build my own: I’d bought a book from PC Mech that covered everything. In case I’d missed something or did something wrong I’d have that concise manual to put me right. I need components. I’ll make a list: Just in case I’ve missed something there – It is my first full-build after all – I’ll check with the book I bought mail-order off the internet from PC Mech … Let’s have a look…Blimey they cover everything in here: Windows 95 to Windows XP, Linux, the lot… OK I have listed everything – Good. Now to order. Oh my god everywhere’s shut early for Xmas! PC World will be open but will charge me a fortune…

Panic mode: I grabbed the telephone directory and ordered a machine to be custom-built for me before Xmas from a firm I’d never heard of. I did that and the custom-built computer arrived in 2 days; it worked, and I used it until April – When the PSU exploded!

Fortunately I’d already made my first build by then; checking everything from the book I’d ordered from PC Mech just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I post-mortem’ d the blown PC and found that the company I’d employed had used all cheap components, the wrong components, (e.g. A 32-bit single-cored Sempron CPU rather than the 64-bit dual-cored Athlon I’d asked for…) and built it badly – so I started legal action against the fairly-local English bodger-company; but that’s a totally different story.

Actually to be honest I needn’t have bothered with the computer room at college had I ordered that book earlier: It was just like a computer course in its own right: In fact I’d go so far as to say that it was more concise than the college course, and everything was well written and easy to understand – Honestly even a beginner without any computer experience whatsoever could use it to teach them how to build their own.

That really pissed me off; because I’d seen it advertised, I think it was the year before I went to college; maybe even before that; but I’d thought ‘Oh; it’s just another American net-profits person flogging more cyber-junk’: I thought I’d find that’s part 1 which I’d bought at a discount, and I’d have to buy all subsequent parts and join a get-rich-quick scheme to continue to receive the other instalments: Oh how wrong I was! I so wish that I hadn’t been so pessimistic and that I’d bought it then and there. It would have saved me time, money, and hassle.

Well I did it all arse-about-face and I paid the price – Literally in some respects; all because I was too cynical and didn’t think that the book was worth buying – I mean it doesn’t exactly cost a fortune either; but Miss Tight here was just procrastinating to save a few £s; and yet it cost me a few £s more maybe: False economy.

I don’t want to say which book it is after all that: I mean if I do and you buy it then you could end up knowing as much as I do and that’ll put me at a disadvantage. Having said that; I kept my money to myself and ended up losing; so if I were to keep my knowledge to myself then would I end up losing also? Probably knowing my luck.

I’ve been churning it over in my mind for some time whether to let the cat out of the bag; but look what procrastination did before; see above.

Which company and/or its staff/owner have I mentioned more in this blog than any other? Apple. – Well almost; but in a slightly derogatory way. No; PC Mech. Why? Because I have experience of PC Mech and I know that I always get a good deal out of them: That’s why I have a membership with PC Mech, like quite a few others also do.

I’m in England; PC Mech are in America. If I were in any way dissatisfied with their service I’m hardly likely to be able to drive over to their office and have a go at them am I? – Oh believe me more than one English company has had a piece of my mind in the past. No; it’s a matter of trust. What more needs to be said?

So no further procrastination. If you make a fortune out of what I share with you then I want half; all right? Like I’ll get it eh? Well you’re going to find out one way or another; so I suppose ‘better from me than someone else. Scroll down.

Either you want to find out which book it is or you don’t. If you do then scroll down. Of course; if you don’t want to custom-build a PC for yourself – ever – then there’s no point: Thanks for reading.

– I’ve had to do some work typing this lot you know; so it’s not going to hurt you to do a tiny bit yourself. Keep scrolling…

Keep going; you’re authorized: Remember; it’s a matter of trust…

If you’ve bothered to scroll all the way down here then you’re either interested to know more or you’re as crazy as me. Whichever is the case you’re about to get what I said you’d get.

In fact I’m not only going to tell you the name of the book; I’m also going to give you a link to a bit more information and the point of purchase. I’ve procrastinated to this point, and now I’m no longer doing so: The knowledge can be yours.

- All you have to do is click on the ad, no more than that.

What; you’ve come all this way and you’re wondering whether you should? Oh give me a break!

OK; If you’re determined to make the same mistake as me and continue procrastinating until you miss your chance then this link will get you out of here.

– Otherwise there’s a square-ish bluey thing below to click on:-

Happy building!

After my continuing opposition to Apple’s products; in particular the iPhone; you’ll probably be surprised to hear that I’m glad that Apple have at last brought out a platform-update in the form of iPhone 2.1.

Apple have not only fixed most of the bugs that came with 2.0 but also have added a number of features.

I’m not an Apple user myself; so I’ll not go into all the tech details here; rather I’ll link you to this site for more on that.

But despite this all my previous commentaries still stand with regard to Apple. If you haven’t seen my previous commentaries in this blog you can find them by using the search facility, by clicking on “Apple” in the tag cloud, or through Google/Yahoo by inputting kkomp.com Apple into the search bar.

Apple are becoming the image of Microsoft in my opinion: They produce buggy unfinished software in their rush to get the product onto the market; after which they fix the bugs with an upgrade – Exactly what M$ did with Vista.

(My blog stats show that, despite Windows being the most-used operating system(s); the number of XP users who visit this blog is almost seven times the number of Vista users. (After Vista comes Linux in third place, followed by Mac OSX, and then Windows 98.))

Back in June 2008 I commented in a scoop that Apple had rushed the 2,0 platform through in order to get out ahead of the LG Viewty; which they saw as the major competition at the time. Well that tactic; while being more Microsofty than anything other than Microsoft themselves, worked; and the Viewty didn’t make it as major competition to the iPhone. It wasn’t only that though; the fact is that the Viewty is an excellent camera-phone; and in that respect alone is many times better than the iPhone. However what the Viewty doesn’t have is the ability to run Apps, and neither does it have an App store.

So in the light of the above; was it worth the rush? Was it worth it for Apple to produce a buggy product ahead of time just to beat a partially-competitive product from a rival to market?

Maybe; maybe not: But the proof of the pudding is in the eating – Jobsweh (Steve Jobs) gambled on it and it worked. I can’t knock it. I wouldn’t have done that myself – But that’s probably why Steve Jobs is CEO of Apple and I’m a blogger. No more need be said on that.

Apple have seemingly at last saved face: Good on them; kudos to them. It’s going to boost the Apple image, and no doubt sales figures will be affected in some positive way.

BUT why follow the Microsoft route? Because it works? It does; but there must be a better way; because it’ll end in being tarred with the Microsofty-brush; if that hasn’t started to happen already.

What do you think this move will bring for Apple? Do you agree that Apple are going the Microsofty route? How would you run Apple if you were Steve Jobs? Feel free to leave a comment.

Today; in a change from my usual Windows-adherent policy, I decided to browse some Open-Source projects – having downloaded Firefox 2.** yesterday and finding that it surprisingly renders this site better than IE7 in Windows XP Professional!

Another Open-Source project I stumbled upon while testing K-Meleon was http://browsershots.org: This is a very useful website to bookmark. With this website you can see exactly what your site looks like in a number of different browsers at 2 resolutions using a variety of operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Free BSD…

For the privilege of so testing their site I’m going to make a donation to the cause: You no doubt see the donate linkin the screenshots, so it would be good to give it a click when you get there and chuck a few bucks into the development coffers if you feel like supporting them.

Life’s a bitch; which is why I always try to be a bigger one.

Here are some more screenshots:-

What do you think; of K-Meleon? Of browserhosts.org? Did you test neither, either, or both? What are your results? Your remarks? Your comment below is welcomed.

No-o! I said “click” ; not “chick”. Sod off until Easter!

Click Here

Buy “WordPress on Crack” – Build your own WordPress plugins: Click Here!

Click Here

We’ve heard moans twice from Apple Fanboi Michael Arrington; but we want to be convinced that it’s not just one voice in the darkness.

Well here it is: The post you never expected to see from one of the new Apple fanboys:-

“Apple Showing Warning Signs”
Posted Aug 28, 2008 by David Risley 

“As many of my readers know, I have converted pretty much everything to Apple products. I am now a Mac user and recently I switched to the Iphone. As of a few days ago, even my keyboard is built by Apple. I am a fan of the company and their products, but I am seeing big red flares that are showing signs of trouble on the horizon.”

(I think that’s meant to be iPhone; but ‘easy typo either way.)

-So David says; and I quote “I am a fan of the company and their products“. Fair enough: Each to their own. He continues:-

“Why I Like Apple“

“It continues to be funny when I witness the emotional reaction Apple can get out of people. A lot of non-Apple geeks are quick to dismiss me as a “fanboy” because I like Apple. Such a reaction is really asinine and, ironically, often comes from people who would buy Apple if not for monetary reasons…”

Help me Wikipedia:

“By 1990 the term was being used in popular music and science fiction circles, and as electronic entertainment gained popularity, the term became increasingly applied to computers and video game consoles – with people often developing an obsessive loyalty towards one platform or brand.”

“Current subjects of such obsessive loyalty include areas of: TV shows; movies; music; anime; comic books; cars; video game consoles, video games and MMORPGs; and computer operating systems, hardware and software—and more recently politics.”

“”Fanboy” was added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in 2008.^“

Next:

 

 

“…But, There Are Warning Signs”

“While I have admired the user-centric design of Apple products, the company has been showing some signs of losing touch. Some examples:

1. Iphone battery life has been a complaint, and it seems really stupid not to have it be user replaceable.
2. The Iphone software has been a bit buggy, worse for some than others. I’ve had my Iphone crash many times. I’ve had it slow down or features stop working that required a restart to fix.
3. No copy & paste on the Iphone? Stupid, stupid stupid. This is OS design 101.
4. The MacBook Air hasn’t been that high quality and many have been reporting stupid problems with it.
5. MobileMe has been a huge ball of fail since it launched, showing once again that Apple is horrible when it comes to anything on the Internet. And the fact that they’re charging money for it when it can all be done for free elsewhere is dumb. Apple tossed users some free time for their troubles, but all that is is free time using a barely functional service. Also, the fact that all the .Mac customers were automatically moved into this crappy service is a case of very poor customer service.
6. There have been complaints about decreased built quality on the MacBooks and MacBook Pros. “

                    Fail                                                   Better

“What I’m sensing is a bunch of Apple users who really want to continue liking Apple, but are having to find ways to explain the parade of bonehead moves and buggy products coming from the company.”

That last sentance was very well written and extremely spot-on-target: Those people are called “Apple fanboys/girls”.

Of course, not being a fanboy himself – and any suggestion that he might actually be a fanboy being “really asinine“; David doesn’t fit anywhere near into that category:

“In all fairness, most computer companies release crappy stuff. I guess Apple is held to a higher standard because of their marketing and the loyal following that they have. Perhaps Apple is just showing us one thing: they’re a computer company just like any other computer company.”

Of course; that’s not actually anything like “ways to explain the parade of bonehead moves and buggy products coming from the company.” : It’s just an excuse for darling Apple’s incompetence – ‘All companies cock-up from time to time: Apple are no different; in fact they’re much better at cocking up than any other company.’

Exactly; just one of the many things they do better than anyone else, isn’t it?

You read it first here; unless you read it first there: Apple cocked up – As admitted under a veil by an Apple…non-fanboy himself.

My analysis? Apple have lost it: I foresee a lot of their market-sector gains dwindling slowly back to much how they were. I see the crown falling from Jobsweh’s head. As a Microsoft fan I don’t see any immediate advantage to Microsoft. I would say that Linux will continue to make small gains from both M$ and Apple, at least until Windows 7 is released.

Do I see Linux reaching 10% market-sector impact? It’s possible but unlikely in my estimation. I won’t rule it out altogether, but Linux had its day; in fact around 3650+ of them. Ubuntu have made inroads in a sense; but the various distros are still proving difficult to give away; even in the light of Microsoft’s shot in its own foot with Vista.

??

Mystery Advert
Click Here 

Today is a “Bank Holiday” in the UK; which is Brit talk for “skive”: That applies to the employed-only populous though: I’m continuing much as usual here, although I did get a chance to finally see a few people I’ve been meaning to see for a while earlier.

It’s been a bumper weekend as far as hits are concerned on this blog; and my thanks to all who made it so: I hope you found the information that you were looking for and that it was useful to you.

In this blog entry I’m going to be focusing on operating systems and browsers with regard to the statistics of this blog from the last six days, and try to give my perception of exactly what this means for their respective markets.

Let’s look at some figures in terms of overall percentages for the operating systems used:

I apologise for the fact that the illustration’s not that clear: Nevertheless it can clearly be seen that Microsoft Windows XP is by far the leading o.s. at 75.8% (Of just over 1000 original hits.) ; beating Windows Vista into an un-commanding second-place at only 8.8%. To me that shows a big failure notice for Microsoft’s latest operating system and confirms the fact that people are sticking to XP for the time being, or downgrading their Vista installation to XP where possible. If this graph were to be taken as a representative sample it would indicate that for every person using Vista, there are 8.61 people still using XP.

What of the rest? Unbelievably in third place behind Vista is the obsolete Windows 98 at 4.3%: This also speaks volumes about Vista, as this says that nearly half as many people as those who currently use Windows Vista would rather use an obsolete operating system than Vista.

Let’s tot up the percentages of all Windows usage excluding Vista: We’ve already got XP at 75.8% and Windows 98 at 4.3%. Also there’s Windows 2000 in sixth place at 1.7%, NT4 at 1.1%, Server 2003 at 0.7%, ME at 0.6%, 95 and CE at 0.1% each.

I make that 84.4% of everybody, using Windows but avoiding Vista. Total Windows usage including Vista = 93.2%.

What of the others? Well there are two Linux groupings on this graph: “Linux” and “Ubuntu Linux”. I’m going to add those two together and call them “All Linux”; giving 2.4% of total: That’s not that bad a representative score for Linux in all honesty, and indicates some growth in the usage of Linux; I think somewhere in the region of 0.5% growth of market share.

Now Apple: There’s Mac OS X coming in at 2.9%, and the iPhone at 1.5%. I’m going to add those together and call them “Apple Platforms”; giving 4.4% of overall usage. This shows significant growth for Apple too; somewhere in the region of a whole percent if I remember correctly.

Obviously this isn’t an official survey, and the statistics gleaned from this are only representative of my viewers. If it were an official survey of a small cross-section of users, and there must be at least some parallel with the official figures, it would indicate that:-

• XP remains the prominent OS of choice.
• Vista is a failure.
• Linux usage is growing fairly fast.
• Apple usage is growing even faster.

To clarify; with apologies for the non-clarity of the graph again:-

• Internet Explorer 6: 50% (!),
• Internet Explorer 7: 23.7%,
• Firefox 2: 8.4%,
• Internet Explorer 5: 6.1%,
• Firefox 3: 4.5%,
• Safari: 3.8%,
• Opera: 0.9%,
• Firefox 1: 0.9%
• Konqueror: 0.7%

The other categories are “Firefox” (No number) 0.6%, Firefox 1.5 0.3%, Generic Gecko 0.1%, and Internet Explorer (No number) 0.1%.

I think what I’ll do is group Firefox, Firefox 1.5, and Firefox 1, together and call them “Not Firefox 2 or 3″, giving 1.8%.

Also I’ll group Internet Explorer and IE5 together and call them “Not IE6 or 7″, giving 6.2%.

OK; so IE6 appears to be a clear favourite: Strange that; I thought that since M$ were distributing IE7 as an auto-upgrade then everyone would start using it. I certainly do, and I prefer it to IE6 – I’m in the minority there it seems. IE7, which I use in XP, comes in second with less than half as many users as IE6. If we assume that all Vista users use IE7, then only 14.9% of XP users have adopted IE7. Fair enough.

Firefox 2 in third. Hmm: Although Firefox 3 was a record download it certainly isn’t a record Firefox; 2 still being the prevalent choice out of the Firefox versions.

Strangely enough IE5 with all its many vulnerabilities and its funny GUI has more users than Windows 98, indicating that people are using it with other Windows versions such as ME and 95.

Firefox 3 with just over half as many users as Firefox 2 eh? : That should be a concern to Mozilla perhaps?

Safari at 3.8% – Well there’s the iPhone accounting for some of it, though I’m surprised its usage is that high.

Even more surprising to me is that Opera’s usage is so low at just 0.9% in comparison to Safari’s beating it by more than a factor of 4 times: Maybe some people know something I don’t?

The rest is pretty much academic anyway – So; in conclusion:-

• IE6 is still the most popular browser.
• IE7 isn’t a failure, but it appears that most people would choose IE6 rather than IE7.
• Firefox as a whole has gained a good foothold and is becoming popular.
• Firefox 3 didn’t go down as well as anticipated.
• IE5 seems to have a cult-following.
• Opera is, in my opinion, underrated.
• Safari is, in my opinion, overrated.

I found that statistical analysis quite exhilarating: I hope you found it interesting and maybe in some ways useful.

What do you think? Are you at all surprised by these results? Do you think that this study is a fair analysis that could be used as a representative cross-section poll of users? Do you think these results are typical? What would you expect the results of an official poll to be; similar, or different? Please feel free to comment.

Update: September 1st 2008:-

I’m getting some good hits from loads of Open-Source browsers all of a sudden: Keep ‘em coming! (IE6 is still in the lead.)

 I’m now going to have to review some of these and blog about them. Excellent!

Click Here 

This; direct from Apple:

“Why is Apple granting a 60-day subscription extension?
The transition from .Mac to MobileMe was rockier than we had hoped.”

First understatement.

“While we are making a lot of improvements, the MobileMe service is still not up to our standards. We are extending subscriptions 60-days free of charge to express appreciation for our members’ patience as we continue to improve the service.”

How generous of Apple to realise that they cocked up – Again!

“Am I eligible for the 60-day extension?
You are eligible if you are a MobileMe member whose account was active as of August 19, 2008 at 0:00 Pacific Daylight Time.”

Ah I knew there was a catch!

“What if I am currently in a free trial period?
If you were in your free trial period on August 19 at 0:00 Pacific Daylight Time, your free trial will be extended an additional 60 days.”

Blah blah…Ah: Is this another crafty catch? :

“I have an activation key. Will I lose my extension if I apply the key now?
If you are currently in your trial period, you will lose the remainder of your trial period —including any extensions— as soon as you apply your activation key.  If you already have a paid subscription, you can enter your key at any time and Apple will automatically apply the key to renew your subscription after your extension period expires.”

Remind me to fire my Advertising Executive

In his blog entry entitled “Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges” he goes on to say:

“My obvious enthusiasm for Apple products is fairly evident to readers of this blog. But recently I’ve had a string of bad apples come my way, so to speak. It’s time for Apple to stop screwing around and start paying attention to product quality.”

He then goes on to speak about the single hour of battery life he gets from his iPhone , as well as certain Apps vanishing at the behest of the great Jobsweh with his lever of power; before, in usual fanboy style, declaring his undying love for his dead battery iPhone; symbol of the divine nature of the great Jobsweh. (Waste of time, costs you a fortune, sub-standard.)

- As his following commentary notes, under the heading:

“Mac Mini, Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and Macbook, All Failed“

* – Read the rest of “Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges“. – *

Some of my online associates say that I’m anti-Apple: I disagree; I’m not in any way prejudiced against Apple because they’re not Microsoft, even though you could say that I’m a Microsoft fan. I’m looking deeply into the eyes of Apple and seeing a culture of control, company domination, and exploitation of customers: In fact I see a kind of Pagan-istic-ish fundamentalist cult religion appearing; one where the faithful hang on every word of and would be willing to give their life for, Jobsweh, the god of all things Apple.

- And even though this cult-following; like a flock of ante-Linux zealots, is happening; the faithful are being sold utter substandard crap for a small fortune as massive amounts of profit appear in Jobsweh’s pockets.

A friend commented that I could be cruising for a lawsuit to be filed against me: Quite obviously Apple strongly discourage the expression of opinion through free speech; but in trying to sue me they’d have to interface American law with British law and probably apply for an extradition warrant, only to end up being paid any settlement from my limited funds at about £1UKP a week.

How many $million was that? Oh well it’ll be paid one day – I can imagine being connected to an Apple-funded life support technology to keep me alive indefinitely until the debt is paid in full; like some frankenstinian contraption from the backrooms of science-fiction in the great Jobsweh’s research laboratories  – Until suddenly the entire thing fails and I begin to rapidly age and die as technicians rush about to resolve the issue:

“Holy shit: We used an iPhone battery to power this thing! That’ll add another £ 55 (includes VAT), plus £ 7.29 shipping and handling, includes VAT.”

“Don’t worry about cost right now; she’s dying, and Jobsweh will be mad at us if he doesn’t get his money!”

“Man are you serious? We’ll have to take all this equipment to an Apple store and wait 5 working days plus shipping time!”

In the post I made earlier entitled “A Geek’s Toolkit Supplement: Loaded USB Drive ” I spoke of what I described as “branding files”: Files that I add to the operating system to indicate that I am supplier, builder, and maintenance tech for a particular computer.

I can hear your brains whirring; so before you start thinking that I’m up to something naughty I’ll show you exactly what I mean. Oh yes; this only works if you have Windows XP installed, so don’t go trying it with a Linux or a OSX installation and then comment that I’ve messed up your operating system or “I can’t find those files in Ubuntu!” – “It doesn’t work with Leopard!” You’re quite right; it doesn’t – So be forewarned.

If this information has already been added to your operating system by the manufacturer then I suggest it best to just leave it anyway.

(Why are you playing about with your computer like this anyway? What do you hope to achieve? Oh well; your problem, not mine.)

The aim of the exercise is to customise Windows XP’s general tab in the System Properties dialogue box that you call up by right-clicking the My Computer icon and selecting Properties.

This customisation involves adding support contract information and a logo. It involves using only Notepad and whatever program you like to use to create a 256-colour bitmap.

Buy “WordPress on Crack” – Build your own WordPress plugins: Click Here!

OK let’s start with the details: I won’t tell you exactly what details I put for computers that I build; so for this exercise we’ll assume that these details are regarding a computer built by the Acme Computer Corporation:

The computer is a Datamax, model 55102. Support line is 1-800-ACME…

Open Notepad and type the following text, replacing the example with your company’s details etc:

[General]

Manufacturer=Acme Computer Corporation

Model=Datamax 55102

[Support Information]

Line 1=Call 1-800-ACME for technical support

Line 2=  ">.invalid

Line 3=500 Billion Byte Drive

Line 4=Pixelgraphicsville, USA

Save this file to %windir%\Windows\System32 as Oeminfo.ini

Create a 256-colour bitmap of your company’s logo that is no more than 96X96 pixels in size. Save this file to %windir%\Windows\system32 as Oemlogo.bmp

Yes I deliberately soiled the picture: ‘Better safe than sorry.

To see the results either right-click on the My Computer icon or press the Windows and the Break key simultaneously.

And that’s how it’s done – No registry edits, no hacking into anything. This is a white box system builder’s trick; but it’s no massive secret. The files aren’t permanent anyway; if you remove them or reinstall your operating system the dialogue box reverts to default.

Fire Your Computer Technician!

A computer technician spills the beans and makes available the knowledge he has charged clients hundreds in service fees for.

CLICK HERE

‘Time for another freebie – It’s been a while.

This program is written in dos; but it will run on XP in normal circumstances without the user doing anything other than clicking on the .exe file. (I’m not sure about Vista though: ‘Never tried it with Vista.)

This program is so small it will fit on a floppy, and it’s very much like the original 1970s arcade game in looks when it’s running. I wish I could remember who the program’s author is but I can’t: Neither can I find it on Google any more.

I discovered this program in 2001 and I’ve been playing it occasionally ever since: When you activate it it’ll take your entire screen but it won’t erase anything that’s on it. Press “Esc” to leave the program and return to normal Windows. It should also be OK running in Linux too; though once again I’ve only ever used it in Windows.

You can download it FREE from this link.

The controls are quite simple: Press return to start the game. To move left press the “Ctrl” key, to move right press the “Alt” key. To fire the canon press the shift key.

I was unable to get a screenshot in the time I had available to write this article; and anything I could find on the web didn’t do the program justice; so excuse the lack of my usual illustrations.

I hope you enjoy playing this relic from the 1970s: It was probably in vogue before a lot of you were even born. At the risk of showing my age I used to play it at the arcade in my teens.

*Disclaimer – This software is supplied as is; without warranty, guarantee, or any charge. I refuse to accept any responsibility for any problem that it causes you or that you may have with it: If you can’t accept that then don’t download it: Having said that it’s never given me any problems whatsoever. Please virus-scan the file before you run it so that you can be sure that I haven’t sent you malware, spyware, or a virus. (I haven’t; but do so anyway as it’s good practice.)

Advertisment:

Fire Your Computer Guy or Girl!

A computer technician spills the beans and makes available the knowledge he has charged clients hundreds in service fees for.

Computer Secrets Unleashed

To find out more

CLICK HERE

It’s called the iPhone Apps Blacklist Feature; and sitting at the remote-cut-off controls of your iPhone is none other than Steve Jobs himself; playing god with your purchase.

It must be a comforting thought for all iPhone users that the great Steve Jobs has control over what Apps you can run on your iPhone that you paid for.

Jobs said that the intent behind the capability is “high minded”: It sounds to me like a case of a control-freak mentality:

“I am the great Steve Jobs; God’s boss, and I shall decree with my awesome power what you will and will not have on your iPhone.”

“Hopefully, we never have to pull that lever,” Jobs said, “but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull.”

It certainly removes a massive element of control by not having it.

What next? MacBooks saying “I’m sorry user; but Steve Jobs has decreed that you are not allowed to run this program; however there is a similar program available from Apple for $$$”?

Apple allegedly need this function to deactivate potentially hazardous software: In other words so that they can instantly defeat any attempt at hacking or at running any open-source Apps from the Open-Source club and the Linux zealots etc.

Last week there was a rumbling and concern amid reports of the so-called “Kill-Switch-Ability” This week the Apple CEO confirmed it himself. We used to think that Microsoft impinged upon personal freedom in computing: This, however, makes Microsoft’s previous alleged control-freak mentality less than academic.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball spoke with an “informed source” at Apple on Friday, who confirmed the presence of a URL inside the iPhone’s Core Location API that downloads a blacklist of applications designated as malicious. Independent iPhone developer and author Jonathan Zdiarski discovered the URL earlier in the week.

Remember; when you are using your iPhone; big Uncle Steve is watching!

Fire Your Computer Technician!

A computer technician spills the beans and makes available the knowledge he has charged clients hundreds in service fees for.

CLICK HERE

Mozilla won’t be developing Firefox as an iPhone App: Mozilla Chief Executive John Lilly says Apple has made it too difficult a task to accomplish. Instead Mozilla will focus on other mobile platforms and in particular the LiMo project, aimed at putting Linux on other mobile devices.

Development of desktop Firefox is still going ahead in leaps and bounds: The alpha release of Shiretoko; AKA Firefox 3.1 has already happened.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.1a1/releasenotes/

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.1a1/releasenotes/#download

Besides adding new filtering features to the Awesome bar where users can filter their searches to show browsing history only, Mozilla are particularly set on improving the Gecko rendering engine and adding a new visual-tabs feature.

What of Microsoft and IE8? Well IE8 is in beta and available for download. I’ve heard that installing this beta kills the Microsoft auto-update ability of Windows to receive critical updates and patches from M$ Update: I don’t know if that’s still true or if they’ve updated the beta to prevent this?

According to Microsoft:

“Some of the new features designed for developers include a developer toolbar and improved interoperability and compatibility…Internet Explorer 8 will take the web experience beyond the page.”

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/features.mspx

- Beyond the update too it appears? I don’t see anything immediately outstanding about enhanced security features; although a Google search reveals this:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=IE8+enhanced+security+features&meta=

The good thing is that IE8 beta is available for download to Windows XP as well as to Vista – I hope this is also the case with the final retail version.

Why, though, has IE8 been in beta so long, while all other browsers are advancing and releasing newer versions? Who knows the mind of Microsoft? Does M$ itself know it’s own mind after the departure of Bill Gates?

WATCH TV on your PC! No monthly fees and no hidden charges! Watch Sports, News, Game Shows, Documentaries, and hundreds of other programs from around the US and the world! Your cable company doesn’t offer this! And there is no monthly fee! Click Here!
 

Twitter, the No.1 micro blogging site, has been targeted in the same kind of attack that befell MySpace and Facebook yesterday. A bogus Twitter profile with a malicious payload has been spotted by security firm Kaspersky.

The link; which says that it is a link to a pornographic video, downloads the dodgy version of Adobe Flash Player; the file “codecsetup.exe”; just as with the occurrences reported yesterday: http://kkomp.com/archives/827 And exactly the same result too: You’re suddenly a part of a botnet, sending span, phishing attacks, and DOS attacks.

Variants of the worms are already appearing according to security firm Kaspersky; who spotted this and yesterday’s two attacks also.

The attack appears to originate in Brazil, a conclusion based upon the use of the Portuguese language, the location of the servers that download the trojans, and the email addresses used also.

Once again only Windows users are vulnerable to these worms etc; so therefore would it be logical to conclude that the perpetrator is a South-American Linux zealot with an axe to grind?

No anti-spyware? – Then you need

XoftSpySE Anti-Spyware .

Designed to scan the user’s complete computer system to detect spyware parasites and quarantine the infected files for immediate protection, XoftSpySE is your fast, dependable anti-spyware defence.

§ Complete PC scanning, including running processes, registry entries, files and folders

§ Detects and removes: adware, spyware, pop-Up generators, keyloggers, trojans, hijackers, and malware

§ One of the largest spyware definition databases in the industry

§ Automatic definition and feature updates

§ Fast, powerful, and easy to use

§ Comprehensive customer technical support

§ Protects against identity and credit card theft

To discover more and get a FREE scan Click Here!

Don’t forget to subscribe to the kkomp.com RSS feed.

“Please give us an o/s that works when you release Windows 7. We, your customers, don’t mind waiting a little longer for a product that has no bugs and no massive security vulnerabilities – Although we would like you to bring it out ahead of schedule ready for Xmas 2009 if possible.”

“You see, Microsoft, you’ve announced a new operating system and we want it; but we want it to be better than XP: You haven’t come up with anything better than XP yet; and Vista was a joke. Even your bosom buddies at Intel won’t switch to Vista – Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

“Are you actually aware that KACE found that 50 percent of people who responded to their survey last November won’t upgrade to Vista? Worse still for you, Microsoft, is that in their recent survey that figure has gone up 20percent of the whole to 60 percent!

http://www.kace.com/about/releases/systems-management-appliance/computer-management-software-alternative/07_23_08.php

 SP1 only made most things Vista work properly; but even then still not quite as well as XP.”

Whoever is running the mess that you’ve turned Microsoft into should get a medal from Apple: Thanks to Vista, Mac sales have risen dramatically. People are switching to Linux despite all its bad press: They use Vista and say “I’m downloading Ubuntu; it can’t be worse than this!”"

“Yes I know that you’ve sold 180 million licenses. How many of those downgraded to XP I wonder? …And the choice was use Vista or have a computer without an operating system: Even Vista is better than no operating system.”

“Yes I appreciate the fact that Bill’s taken a back seat and now all the top execs want a piece of the pie; yes I know they all want to take Microsoft individually in a particular direction and are all pulling against each other; but Bill should have forseen that. He probably did; but just wanted out, having made enough money to buy a small country for his retirement.”

“So come on Microsoft; get your act together and give us something good: We’re not asking for miracles; we just want something better and more suited to today’s climate than before. I realise you’ve made boobs like this in the past, such as ME; but at least ME didn’t force the user to get new hardware to run an operating system that wasn’t as good as the last one.”

“You know all about bootstrapping – If you’ve forgotten ask Bill for a reminder – So it’s time for you to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and smell the coffee again: I don’t mean have a tea-break either. It’s down to you to carry on without Bill at the helm. Can you do that? I’m watching that space.”

Kind Regards from Sharron. x

“P.S. You shot yourselves in the foot when you stopped all the big companies from selling XP. You hoped it would force people to change to Vista; but people didn’t want Vista; they wanted a change to something better, so they had 2 choices: Mac or Linux.

If Windows 7 isn’t a gem of an operating system that works first time and is better than XP then I’m buying a Mac.”

There are a lot of explanations doing the rounds; and a lot of them are part of the reason; but only part of it.

This is sometimes true and sometimes not: It depends on the type of disk, the manufacturer, and the age of the unit. You’ll find that firmware written to the disk in this way mainly occurs on some brands of external hard-drive. Even if there is firmware on the disk, though, that’s not the whole answer to the question.

File Allocation Table

The file allocation table is a part of the disk reserved by the disk’s file system, (Usually FAT32 or NTFS) when the disk is formatted.

In short the file allocation table keeps track of what data is stored where on the disk so that the integrated electronics can consult the listing to report the data’s location to the operating system should it be queried or to be able to almost instantly access the data when the operating system requires it – But again the file allocation table is only part of the story.

The Main Reason

The main reason is to do with the method used to measure the total number of bytes: The computer’s algorithms use binary (Base 2); while the manufacturers use denary (Base 10 or decimal). A basic unit for measuring the capacity of any storage device is the kilobyte: In the binary system used in the computer’s algorithms a kilobyte is 1000 bytes expressed as a power of 2; in this case 2 to the power of 10 or 1024 bytes.

Manufacturers, on the other hand, define a kilobyte as 1000 bytes expressed as a power of 10; in this case 10 to the power of 3 or 1000 bytes: Therefore a manufacturer correctly labels their disk as containing 100,000,000 kilobytes of 1000 bytes each, or 100 gigabytes; yet the computer reads it as 97.65625 gigabytes, or 97,625,250 kilobytes of 1024 bytes each.

So there we have it; by using different methods of counting based upon binary and denary respectively, the manufacturer and the computer both arrive at different answer; although both are technically correct.