My Blog Banners

Some of you (and there aren't many) might be wondering about the banners I've been using recently. They are panoramas from photos I've taken on my travels. Here're links to the ones I have out there now:

• 
  Auckland Harbor


• 
  The Seine


• 
  Salisbury Cathedral


• 
  Stonehenge


• 
  Peggy's Cove


• 
  Noonan's Shore


• 
  Florence


• 
  Nantucket Flowers - added 06/13/05


• 
  Lyceum - added 07/03/05


• 
  Tomatoes - added 07/03/05


• 
  Manning Way - added 07/03/05


• 
  Pumpkins - added 10/26/05


• 
  London Tube Map - added 01/29/06


• 
  Paris Metro Map - added 03/03/06


• 
  Red-Tipped Photinia - added 04/04/06


• 
  Honda Indy V8 - added 07/19/06


• 
  The Colosseum - added 04/09/07


• 
  St. Stephens Cathedral, Vienna - added 06/22/07


• 
  St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin - added 12/25/07


• 
  Dun Chaoin, Kerry, Ireland - added 03/01/08


• 
  Cloth House, Krakow, Poland - added 06/27/08


• 
  Galley Head, Ireland - added 11/22/08


• 
  Poulnabrone Tomb, Ireland - added 03/06/09


• 
  O'Donovan's Bar, Ireland - added 03/06/09


• 
  Moon Bounce - added 03/06/09


• 
  Golden Gate Bridge - added 03/06/09

You can see all my photos here.

How S.M.A.R.T. Are You?

I went off on a wild goose chase the other day (so what's new?) thinking I had a hard drive problem. It wasn't a hard drive problem but I learned something along the way.

I remembered once I did have a hard drive problem and I ran IBM's Drive Fitness Test (DFT). It showed you not only the hard errors but soft errors as well. That program was a DOS program that you had to make a special boot disk to run. It seemed to me that there should be something you could run under Windows to get at this data.

I Google'd DFT and ran across "S.M.A.R.T." S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology.

I found 2 programs that report S.M.A.R.T. data for Windows. The first is Active SMART. This is shareware that costs $25. There are details below. The second program I found is smartmontools. smartmontools is FREE from SourceForge.

I couldn't figure out how to install smartmontools. I downloaded and installed Active SMART (beware that it sets itself to start when you boot and doesn't ask).

Anyway, here are screen shots from Ariolic's web site.







There's a lot of detail on S.M.A.R.T. here. Let me know if you figure out how to install smartmontools.

Vivisimo

Make sure you're sitting down. I'm going to talk about a search engine that isn't Google!

Have you ever seen Vivisimo? It's a meta search engine but it has a twist. Vivisimo is the parent company of Clusty. Vivisimo is the more up-scale of the two. What they both do is query a number of search engines (by default MSN, Lycos, Looksmart, Wisenut, Open Directory, and Ask Jeeves) and then cluster the results into groups. It really makes more sense when you look at it.

Here's a screen shot:


Over at the left are the "Clustered Results." You can see that I searched for "trackpoint keyboard usb" and got 155 hits. These occur in the following "clusters:" UltraNav (40), Reviews (27), Space Saver (21), etc.

Even neater is the "preview" feature. Each result has a list of options following it. One of these is "preview." What this does is bring up a portion of the web page that is referenced by the result URL. I've done this on the second result. Those of you with good memories will recall that Google had a Google Labs tool that did this also.

You can click on the clusters at the left to narrow the search. Often these clusters are nested with narrower clusters. It's like you kept adding keywords to refine your search.

I tend to use Vivisimo when I'm hunting for a needle in a haystack. It helps you quickly identify ever smaller result sets to crawl through.

Google Sightseeing

You know what a sucker I am for Google. I ran across Google Sightseeing on Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics newsletter.

So I tried it myself. Here's the Grove at Ole Miss. Too bad it wasn't taken on a game day!

RSS and XML

I like to think that I'm always learning about something. Recently, I have been trying to learn about RSS and XML. A while back I switched my favorites over to FavoriteSync. That give me an XML file of my favorites. I haven't figured out how to edit the XSL file that renders it for browsing. You can't browse to this file. You have to "Save as..."

Recently, I've been playing with using RSS to add local news to my DeSotoNet home page. I used Yahoo's news search (and clicked on Advanced Search). I structured the query to give me the results I wanted. I actually found I had to go hack the URL that generated the results to take out the dates. Then on the results page, I saved the link on the "View as RSS" button. You can browse to this and see the raw XML.

Obviously that's not how I wanted that to present. Just as obviously, I don't have a clue (yet) as to how to make it render better. So, as usual, I went looking for someone who had already done it.

I subscribe to Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics newsletter. An article in July 2004 described how to "RSS-ize my web site." Ever the link pack-rat, I saved that away for future reference.

One of the links on that page was to RSS-to-JavaScript.com. They have a free service that will take RSS and format it into JavaScript that can be embedded in html!

Here's the result. Looks pretty good if I do say so myself.

NirCmd

A while back, I wrote about MyWebExPC. It's worked real well for me. I use it primarily to remotely access my parents' PC.

But (isn't there always a "but?"), now and then my parents' DSL connection drops. Even thought the DSL connection comes back up, the MyWebExPC connection won't reconnect. I entered a ticket to WebEx. Their response was:

I understand your concern and apologize for your inconvenience.

This issue is due to interruption in Internet connection on the remote computer. For MyWebEx PC Agent to run continuously, there should be an uninterrupted Internet connection on the remote computer.

If the Internet connection drops then you need to reconnect the MyWebEx PC Agent to MyWebEx PC server again on the remote computer by following these steps:

1. Click the remote access icon on your remote computer (located in on the bottom right hand of your screen down by the clock - the icon looks like two little balls connected by two lines).

2. Right click it, which will give you the option to "log in." Enter your user name and password and click Ok. If you then refresh the "my computers page" the machine will appear available and you should then be able to take control.

This will solve the issue.

If you need further assistance, please get back to us at your convenience.

Well, duh!

So off I went for my own solution. And I found one. NirSoft has a freeware program, nircmd.exe, that will let you stop and start a service with one command line. I used the following command to create a scheduled task:

at 04:00 /every:monday,tuesday,wednesday,thursday,friday,saturday,sunday nircmd.exe service restart atnthost

What this does is create a scheduled task that runs as the Administrator. It runs every day at 4:00 AM and stops and restarts the MyWebExPC service.

While the DSL connection hasn't failed since I set this up, this should fix it.

Free PDF Creator

Wait! Don't stop reading! This isn't the printer driver that makes you install all that software on your computer. This is a mail-away technique.

What I'm talking about is PDF Online. Here's a blurb from their web site:

Free PDF Conversion Services
Serving over 3,000,000 document conversions so far!

Since 2001, PDF Online (formerly goBCL / goHTM) has been providing quick and free document conversion into PDF and HTML formats.

No need to install anything. As a web-based server solution, PDF Online allows you to automatically convert documents from your PC or your Mac, from your home or your office or anywhere in the world!

You can send them a DOC, RTF, XLS, or TXT file up to 2 MB and they will convert it to a PDF document and e-mail it back to you.

Works great!

Photo Printers

I investigated photo printers a while back. What I found is that there's a BIG difference in consumer photo printers. There are 2 very different types: dye sublimation and inkjet. Inkjet prints in dots while the dye sublimation uses the same technique as commercial photo printers.

There's a good article on the differences here.

Here's a search on dye sublimation printers so you can see which models they are.

Sony's DPP-EX50 Picture Station is a dye sublimation printer. Steve's Digicams looks at the cost per page. He says:

The DPP-EX50 sells for about $180 and the ribbon and paper averages about $0.60 per print when making 4 x 6" postcard size prints.

That price per print seems high to me when I can get commercial digital prints at Walgreen's for $0.29. Better yet, I can use Picasa and upload them to Wal-Mart and have them waiting for me for $0.19 ($0.17 if you use Sam's Club). And remember, the pickup location can be at ANY Wal-Mart so you can send them to your mother's home town.

Google Suggest

Y'all know how big a Google fan I am. Remember my previous article on Google SMS. I ran across Google Suggest while crawling blogs tonight. There's background on it here.

Here's the article that led me to Google Suggest. It discusses the technology behind it.

I call myself watching what's going on at Google Labs but I missed this. I found Google Video the other day but it still seems pretty much crippled. Every link says "Video is currently not available." Stay tuned!

ThinkPads

I must confess. I'm a ThinkPad addict. They're all over my house.

At work, my first one was a 560. Then I moved up (so I thought) to a 240. That one had a weird keyboard and I gave it away as soon as I could to someone who was a hunt and peck typist. Next came the 600 series. The last pre-Dell system was an X20 (which I am still using to type this!).

I got my daughter a 760 for college and won a second one! Her 760 ran until the hard drive started making funny noises. I replaced it with a new-in-the-box 600. Soon after, my work's off lease ThinkPads started turning up on the recycler's list. I grabbed a couple of 600Es, one to replace her 600 and one for myself. If you max these out with memory and don't load up the hard drive (6 GB) with junk, they make a great Windows XP machine.

A few T20s have turned up at the recycler. I grabbed one of them for my Ben in the Den system. When my personal X20 was just about out of warranty, I gave in and got a Dell C400. I sent the X20 off to IBM with a laundry list of "problems." They fixed each one and I got back a practically new X20! I played with Linux at work on this X20 for a while then turned it back to the recycler. I bought it back from them and have been treating it lovingly ever since.

It's amazing at the difference in a 4 year old X20 and the latest Dell D400. The X20 still blows it away. I can't imagine what a new X40 would be like.
You can see pictures of many of the ThinkPads here.

Maxthon

You've probably read what kind or problems I've had with Firefox. I had stumbled across MyIE2 some time back but since it used the IE engine, I fell into the rush to Firefox.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I ran across Maxthon (formerly known as MyIE2). This time I read it closer and then downloaded it (after all, it's free!).

Wow! It's got a lot of the Firefox capabilities (tabs, ad blockers, sidebars) but it renders like IE. I even like some of its features better than Firefox. For example, double clicking a tab closes it. Double clicking on the favicon in the address bar opens a new tab with the same URL. The Favorites sidebar has the ability to auto-hide. It has a super drag-and-drop where if you click and drag a link, that link opens in a new tab.

The number of Maxthon's options makes Firefox's look wimpy.

There are things I don't like. I miss my google tool bar. It doesn't have IE's popup blocker. The one built into Maxthon is more irritating than IE's. The help, well, there is NO help. It is slooooow rendering xsl pages.

My Favorites

I use lots of computers. Besides the work laptop, at home I have 2 desktops (sometimes 3) and around 4 laptops going. It would be a nightmare keeping up with favorites on all of them. For years, I have used BlinkPro. With the January IE patches, the drag-and-drop link to bookmark a page quit working. My second inquiry to them yielded the following:

It appears that this feature is not going to be solved. The drag-and-drop functionality was only ever available on IE. Since Service Pack 2, it has not been available for most users on IE and caused other problems for those users. As a result, we have discontinued this feature.

Drat.

That sent me out on a quest to find an alternative. I started at my favorite (pardon the pun) software source SourceForge.net. I found some interesting alternatives (BookmarkSync and LinkDistributor) but I kept running into references to SyncIt. When I went to www.syncit.com to see what that was all about, I was really confused. Then I ran across an explanation on www.webookmark.com. Interesting, but sad, story. Seems like lots of folks lost their bookmarks.

There are a couple of companies out there that have picked up SyncIt's code and are offering it for free or for a subscription. SyncIt's story and my experience with BlinkPro made me leery. I wanted something that I could control end-to-end.

I played with creating a web folder on my website, but couldn't get Windows to set My Favorites to a web folder. I even tried TweakUI.

In my searching, I finally came across FavoriteSync.com. They apparently are one of the organizations that picked up SyncIt's code but they have a twist. In addition to storing your favorites on their server (it's nagware), you can use any ftp site. It was a piece of cake to just point their application to my web site! Now, each computer has it's own copy of My Favorites synchronized with the others. Updates are pushed after 2 minutes (default but changeable) and pulled every 4 hours (ditto). The file on the server is even in xml. There's an xsl file that describes how to render it. I've got to learn about that.

When you install FavoriteSync, just ignore all the questions about setting up an account with them. Click on through and let it install. It'll show up in the system tray as a star. Right click on it and choose Options. Setup the Server tab to point to your ftp server.

I'm slowly weaning myself away from BlinkPro and onto FavoriteSync and am having NO trouble. You can see them here.

Sysinternals Junction

I've been working on a better method to manage my images. My technique is still emerging but is described here. What I got to thinking about was that programs like gaim want to write their data, e.g. logs, to their own directory and that wouldn't be on my data drive. I poked around on gaim's website to see if I could point their log directory to another location. All I could find was a lot of Linux references to symlinks. I could guess what these were and that they would do what I needed but didn't know how to do that on Windows.

google can find ANYTHING. I kept running into comments about Microsoft's fsutil. I'm convinced that this will do what I needed but I'll be damned if I can figure it out.

The other reference I kept turning up was Sysinternal.com's Junction utility.

Here's their description:

Win2K's version of NTFS supports directory symbolic links, where a directory serves as a symbolic link to another directory on the computer. For example, if the directory D:\SYMLINK specified C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32 as its target, then an application accessing D:\SYMLINK\DRIVERS would in reality be accessing C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS. Directory symbolic links are known as NTFS junctions in Win2K. Unfortunately, Win2K comes with no tools for creating junctions - you have to purchase the Win2K Resource Kit, which comes the linkd program for creating junctions. I therefore decided to write my own junction-creating tool: Junction. Junction not only allows you to create NTFS junctions, it allows you to see if files or directories are actually reparse points. Reparse points are the mechanism on which NTFS junctions are based, and they are used by Win2K's Remote Storage Service (RSS), as well as volume mount points.

It is only 16KB. Download it and put it in c:\windows\system32.

The command to redirect a folder is so simple.

junction "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Application Data\.gaim\logs" "E:\gaim logs"

Simply, this will make anything that references "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Application Data\.gaim\logs" end up in "E:\gaim logs".

I even made me a .bat file to execute this when I need it. That should only be when I build a system from scratch.

Linksys Network Storage Link

CompUSA had an item in this week's flyer that amazed me. It was a Linksys Network Storage Link device.

This tiny network appliance connects USB 2.0 hard drives directly to your Ethernet network. You can connect up to two stand-alone USB disk drives of any size, and access them from anywhere on your network. You can even plug a USB flash disk into the Network Storage Link, for a convenient way of accessing your portable data files. The Network Storage Link can also be set up so that your storage devices are accessible from the Internet -- files can be easily downloaded via your web browser. Your files can be available publicly, or create password-protected accounts for authorized users.

Think about that for a second. Not only is it a clever device but it's advertised in the Sunday newspaper. That kind of device was a niche solution even to data centers just 5 years ago.

Here's what it looks like:

The Network Storage Link features built-in disk utilities, accessible through your web browser. ... It will even send you an email message when a hard drive gets nearly full, completely full, or has an error.

Here's a link to the user guide. It just blows me away that this stuff is in the consumer realm.

PS. I had a similar entry here.

MyWebExPC

I recently built a new PC for my parents. They live about 30 miles away. The first weekend after I moved them to it, I went over to setup the imaging software. While there, I discovered they had a worm. That's a whole article to itself. Anyway, I realized after I left that I hadn't done the removal properly so I had to go back the next day.

There had to be a better way. I searched for how to use RealVNC that I had used on my SageTV system but to do this across the Internet required setting up SSH that was way over my head. pcAnywhere seemed like a good idea but their web site talked mostly about a corporate implementation behind a firewall. GoToMyPC looked like it would do it but costs $19.95 per month.

Then I ran across an article that said that WebEx was introducing a remote control service. My company uses WebEx for intercompany conferencing so I was familiar with their other services. The best part was that you get unlimited access for up to 5 PCs. Here's what you get for free.

Here're some excerpts from their FAQ:

How hard is it to set up and use?
It is really simple:

• Download and install a small MyWebEx PC agent on the remote computer you want to access
• Make sure the remote computer has an always-on connection to the Internet and the MyWebEx PC agent is running
• At the remote location bring up the browser, login, and setup your remote computer
• A small browser plug-in will download automatically and within seconds you will be set up and ready to access your remote computer, virtually, from anywhere

You do not have to:

• Open any ports or configure your firewall in anyway
• Know any IP addresses or other technical networking details
• Install any software or drivers on the computer to view

Is it secure?
MyWebEx PC is extremely secure:

• No need to open any ports in your firewall
• End to end SSL encrypted.
• Two levels of authentication.
• Unique phone authentication for very high security.
• You can protect your privacy
• Blank the screen of the remote computer so no one can see what you are doing
• Lock the keyboard and mouse of the remote computer so no one else can interrupt it
• Logout or screen-lock the remote computer after your session is complete- MyWebEx PC will let you log back in

You do have to use IE to access the remote PC as MyWebExPC uses an ActiveX control.

I made one more trip to my parents' and installed MyWebExPC. It works like a charm. I used it to install the February Windows Updates and reboot their PC. Hooray!

gmail Invites

You can get a gmail invite here. You can read about gmail here.

Super Bowl Ads

The best part of the Super Bowl is always the ads. If you missed some of them while you were taking a bathroom break, now you can catch up. IFILM has them online.

Backup Image

I've been building several XP systems recently. One for my mother and one on a ThinkPad X20 I'm putting together. With lots of practice, I'm pretty good at it but it does get tedious. What I started looking for is a low cost (free) imaging tool.

I subscribe to Fred Langa's newsletter and he talks about this topic from time to time. This issue is dedicated to backup images.

I searched for imaging tools and finally turned up Partition Saving.

Here's a brief description:

Partition Saving is a DOS program that is used to save, restore and copy hard-drive, partitions, floppy disk and DOS devices.

With this program you could save all data on a partition to a file (such as you could save this file on a CD for example). Then if something goes wrong, you can completely restore the partition from the backup file. You no longer have to reinstall every piece of software from scratch. All you have to do is restore the partition from the backup file and then update any software that was modified since the backup was created.

While this isn't as sophisticated as some of the software in Langa's newsletter, it works fine.

I partition my drive into 3 partitions: C: the boot partition, D: the data partition, and E: the backup partition. For example, on a 20 GB drive, I make C: 10 GB, D: 4 GB, and E: 6 GB. I make C: and D: NTFS and E: FAT32. I don't have a lot of experience to validate these sizes but they seem like a good starting point.

I took my trusty Windows 98 rescue disk and used Roxio to create a bootable CD with the Partition Saving program on it. The CD is just such a nicer package than 2 floppies.

Partition Saving supports an options file that looks like it will let you specify all the parameters and run your backup or restore without intervention. I haven't tried this yet though.

Read through all the documentation. It has a compression algorithm but you seem to get most of the benefit with the first level of compression. Also, watch the DOS drive letters carefully as DOS won't see the NTFS partitions. Partition Saving will show them by volume name so remember that when you set them up. Make the volume names meaningful. You can also specify that the output be segmented into sizes that will fit on CD-Rs.

My plan is to put all the non-volatile data (e.g. My Documents) on D:. Then after I do all my tweaking on the C: partition, I'll back it up to E:. I can burn those files to CD-Rs if I want to. When the system gets toasted, I will just restore from E: and I'm right back where I started. Cross your fingers.

I'll post more after I play with it some.

Acrobat Allow Fast Web View

Remember in my last post I asked how to "make that AcroRd32.exe go away when I am no longer using it in a browser?" Well, nobody came forward so I figured it out for myself.

Open Acrobat, go to Edit then Preferences. Uncheck the box "Allow Fast Web View" and click Ok.


That's it! Try it.

I know I'm supposed to be using Firefox but...

...I keep running into little things. Individually, they aren't a big deal but in aggregation (aggravation?), they really are a pain. I wrote about this previously here.

I've been trying to plan a trip for this summer. So I go to travelocity.com. I put in my city pair, select "Flexible Dates," select the months I want to travel, and click on "Search Flights." Then I get this dialog box that says "Please check trip dates for the proper date format." Gimme a break! The dates are in drop-down lists.


The same steps in IE work fine.

Then I went to look at the post I made to my blog this morning. Firefox rendered it with different spacing around the title and the long hyperlink was overlaying the CSS column to the right.


Needless to say, IE rendered it as expected.


Now, I'm getting where I like Firefox. I'm almost used to the tabs. I keep wanting to do ALT+TAB rather than CTRL+TAB to move between windows. Even when I do remember, toggling CTRL+TAB won't flip back and forth between 2 tabs like toggling ALT+TAB will between 2 windows. And I lose screen space for the tabs. I know I can turn them off but everybody else raves about tabs. Must be just me.

Firefox has some really nice extensions. The one I use most often is Adblock. I wish I had something like that for IE. Oh, almost forgot. Firefox seems to be a memory hog. I've seen it take well over 50 MB of RAM. Here's what it looks like right now.


I'm hanging in there but it's not getting easier.

PS. Maybe somebody out there is smarter than me (for sure!). How can I make that AcroRd32.exe go away when I am no longer using it in a browser? I'd really like to have that 16 MB of RAM back.

Another Nice Thing from Microsoft

This is from Risks Digest 23.66:

Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 13:49:15 -0800
From: Rob Slade
Subject: Microsoft AntiSpyware beta - quick review

The beta version of Microsoft's Anti-Spyware program (purchased from Giant) is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=321cd7a2-6a57-4c57-a8bd-dbf62eda9671&displaylang=en&Hash=5BMW635

The beta version is about a 6.4 meg download, and can be downloaded as a file in order to copy and install it onto other machines. That's very nice, and a departure from Microsoft's often heavy-handed approach.

Installing offers you a few options: do you want to set it to automatically update (I did), do you want it to install real-time protection (I did: so far it hasn't interfered with much, but I haven't used it much, either), and do you want to join Spynet. Spynet is not an invitation to join a kind of corporate CIA, but will report on "suspect" files. There is a fair amount of information on what it collects, if you ask for it. It seems to send information about file sizes and an MD5 hash back to HQ, but not, seemingly, the suspect file itself. In any case, there wasn't enough information on what it *doesn't* collect for me to feel comfortable, so I turned it off. (I hope.)

The installation seems to default to a reasonably protected mode: the defaults are for auto updating, real-time protection, and scheduled scans (although the schedule is for 2 am).

When you start up the program, it is initially set for a quick scan. I changed that to a full scan, which took about half an hour on my machine.

From a quick test, the MS antispyware, at least in beta, falls between Spybot S&D and Adaware in terms of detection. Spybot is fairly conservative, and only deals with stuff that is pretty certain to be spy/adware, whereas Adaware will detect a bunch of other stuff. The MS product detected one copy of BackWeb (inactive) that Spybot had not, and detected about 38 copies of 15 versions of other stuff from my samples directory. (Adaware quarantined about 60.) The items detected all seem to have a least some remote access component, even if it is rather limited (such as BadTrans.B, that drops a keylogger). Oddly, it only detected two of my extensive collection of Bagles.

You can ask the program to deal with individual threats in different ways, although seemingly not individual files. (As a researcher, I like that. In terms of protection, I'm not as sure.) The options are to remove, quarantine, ignore, or always ignore. The program usually defaults to quarantine, although some threats are considered more serious, and marked to remove. The explanation of "always ignore" is not detailed enough, as far as I am concerned: does this mean always ignore this particular file, or always ignore this threat?

You can also specify certain directories to scan, or to ignore. Again, as a researcher I really appreciate the ability to tell it so ignore my sample directory. Unfortunately, this option doesn't work properly: it scans directories you tell it to ignore, regardless. When I told it to scan *only* my sample directory, it seemed to scan a fair amount of other stuff as well. Again, from a protective standpoint, this is probably a good thing.

At the moment, after a very quick test, I'd provisionally recommend the use of the MS/Giant antispyware program, at least in fairly restricted and manual mode. I'd be interested in hearing from others who have tested the real-time operations more extensively, and particularly from anyone who has tested the Spynet capabilities, and what information is returned thereby.

http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev or http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade

I haven't tried it yet.

Something Nice from Microsoft

Today, Microsoft has released a "Malicious Software Removal Tool." You can get it here. According to Microsoft, it

...checks Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 computers for and helps remove infections by specific, prevalent malicious software—including Blaster, Sasser, and Mydoom. When the detection and removal process is complete, the tool displays a report describing the outcome, including which, if any, malicious software was detected and removed.

Notice they didn't mention Windows 98 or ME.

They said that this program will be updated on the second Tuesday of each month in the regular patch cycle.

If you're running Internet Explorer (why would you be doing that?), you can even run the tool online on this same page.

Here's what the output looks like:


There's a lot more information on this page.

DVDs for Seniors

My parents' old cabinet TV finally gave up the ghost. For Christmas, they picked out a new entertainment center and I bought them a 27" Toshiba nearly flat screen and a DVD/VCR combo. I wanted the VCR since they still have a lot of old video tapes that they watch every now and then. I thought the DVD player would give them more options.

However, ...

What I didn't figure was the complexity of the DVD player's remote control. They need the DVD player to work just like the VCR. Tune the TV to channel 3, pop in the media (a DVD in this case), and sit back in the recliner. No buttons, no remote.

What I came up with was to rip the DVDs to where all that was on them was the movie and no menu. This was much easier than I thought.

I use DVDShrink and DVD Decrypter. DVDShrink lets you "reauthor" the DVD selecting just the files you want. By default, no files are chosen so I choose just the main title and the English sound tracks. 8 times out of 10, this results in no reencoding.

Here're some screen captures. First, open the disk in DVDShrink. You'll see that it starts in "Full Disk" mode. The compression required to fit this DVD on a 4.7 GB disk is 47.8%.


As I mentioned, I wanted to re-author this DVD to remove all the menus so click on "Re-Author." Drag the "Main Title" over to the left panel and click on the "Compression Settings" tab. Now uncheck all the stuff you don't want on the right. Watch the compression go down!


I always want as little compression as I can get so now click on the double arrows just left of the word "Video." This lets you crop the movie from the front and rear. You'll notice that the time has been reduced from 02:15:10 to 02:07:14 and the compression is down to 77.5%.


You're almost done. Now click on "Backup!" In this dialog box, click on "Quality Settings" and make sure that "Perform deep analysis..." is checked. This makes DVDShrink do a double pass and use Variable Bit Rates when it recompressess the movie.


Wait! Click on the "Target Device" tab. DVDShrink recognizes DVD Decrypter and automatically invokes it to burn the output DVD. I've got a DVD reader and a DVD burner so I put the source DVD in the reader and a blank in the burner. Click on "OK" and you're off.


If there's no recompression required, my system (with a 2.4X DVD burner) takes about 20 minutes. If you have to recompress, your mileage may vary.

I'm running DVDShrink v3.2.0.15 and DVD Decrypter v3.2.3.0. My processor is an AMD Athlon XP 2000+. My DVD burner is a Sony DRU-120A.

You can find DVDShrink and DVD Decrypter at VideoHelp.

Clip-Snipe

Remember when I wrote about VideoReDo? It continued to exceed my expectations until the trial ran out. The $50 license fee made me hesitate. I went back to my favorite software source, sourceforge.net. As usual, I found an open source project that met my needs, Clip-Snipe. Clip-Snipe came so close to what VideoReDo would do. There were a couple of minor differences so I wrote the author with my "wish list." Amazingly, he wrote me back in 2 days with an explanation on how he could accomplish what I had sent him. I figured that'd be the last I heard from him. Not hardly. 8 days later he had posted a new version of Clip-Snipe including all of the items I had mentioned!

Now comes the downside. As I used Clip-Snipe more and more, I began to notice that it wasn't cutting the mpeg exactly where I wanted it to. It seemed to be a couple of frames off. I suspected that I knew what the problem was. mpeg has "keyframes" that form the foundation of the next several frames. Cutting an mpeg video between keyframes tends to cause flashes on replay. VideoReDo overcomes this by re-encoding just those couple of frames around where you cut.

Here's Clip-Snipe's author's explanation:

Rtvedit (which was writtten by someone else) performs edits based on keyframes. It does allow specifying timecodes to the millisecond, but in reality it jumps to the nearest keyframe for cuts. The reason I chose it was for the smooth transitions between cuts. Mpgtx, another cutter, trimmed closer than rtvedit but always left garish flashes between cuts.

Such is life with freeware - and with apps that depend on other freeware. ;)

While it would be great to have cutting at frames and other high-end options, I would rather pay a few $$$ for commercial software than be bogged down for several months writing an mpeg cutter. Besides, settop DVD recorders are now under $150 and will eventually have quality editors built-in.

So here I am. While I continue to be amazed by the quality of open source software, I think I'm going to have to spring for the $50 license for VideoReDo.

Cheap Web Hosting

I've been using addr.com to host desotonet.com. They're $10 per month. Their service has been good but their price seems high compared to others I've found. My all time cost leader is ucvhost.com. They're REAL cheap ($1/month for 25 MB) and hosted in New York but their support is in New Delhi and somewhat hard to interact with. The good news is that once you get them up and working, they work real well.

Most recently, I've come across globat.com. They're in California. Their current rate is $7.95 per month for 2.5 GB. They regularly run specials and I got it for $3.98 per month for the first year. I'm looking to move my photos from photoaccess.com to my own site.

Sport TV Gadgets

Ever wondered how the yellow first down line works on football games? How about the call-out boxes that follow the NASCAR cars around the track? As it turns out, one company does both: SporTVision.

Here's a link to a clip of the NASCAR technology (TV, not cars obviously). Here's how they do the NASCAR stuff.

Here's how they do the yellow first down lines. I was surprised that the calculations take so long that they have to insert a delay in the audio to keep things synced up.

A related gadget is Skycam from CF InFlight. Here's what it looks like:

And here's how it works.

Interestingly, in a recent Formula 1 broadcast, they had a tachometer overlaid on the screen. The RPMs were over 19,000 which is pretty high even for an F1 engine. The commentators pointed out that the RPMs were calculated from the frequency of the exhaust sound.

Any you thought you knew EVERYTHING about Google?

I ran across a new Google feature tonight: Google SMS. To net it out, you can send a Google query from your cell phone to 46645 (GOOGL). Examples of the querys are:

• Pottery Barn 02116
• john smith palo alto ca
• define prosimian
• 5+2*2

There's a pocket-sized PDF of tips here.

PS. Remember that all of these querys work with the Google web page also!

VideoReDo

With my HTPC, I've been looking for one last Holy Grail. I think I've found it.

What I've been looking for is something to let me edit out commercials from the files created by SageTV. TMPGEnc is the most often referenced. However, it also has a reputation of being less than straight-forward to use. I kept on looking and finally ran across VideoReDo. VideoReDo is an mpeg editor. That's all it does. Simply, it will cut scenes from an mpeg file and create an edited mpeg file in seconds (well, single digit minutes, more later).

It has a simple (albeit oddly colored) GUI with simple controls. Just drag the slider along the time line until you find the place you want to cut. Click on the "Sel. Start" button. Use one of the quick jump buttons (10 seconds, 30 seconds, or 2 minutes forward or backward) and click on the "Sel. End" button. If one of the quick jump buttons don't take you exactly where you want, there's even a fine time line slider to zero in. And wonder of wonders, it works GREAT over my wireless RealVNC connection. The update is quick enough I can just slide along the video looking for commercials to cut. When you're done, click on "Save As..."

Back to speed. For my Half-D1 recordings, an hour of video is about 1,3xx,xxx KB. Cutting out the commercials reduces this to about 88x,xxx KB. VideoReDo saved these in just under 3 minutes. uLead DVD MovieFactory 2 SE doesn't blink on these files and will write them without re-rendering!

It has a full function 21-day trial period (go ahead as you install it and request a trial key to lift the 30 minute restriction). It costs $50 for a full license.

It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your data is?

When is the last time your hard drive crashed? Terrible, wasn't it? And how much did you have backed up? Well, it happened to me a while back. And I had practically none of it backed up. I've become fanatical since then. Here's how I do it.

My general methodology is to create sets of data that'll fit on CD-Rs. To keep the data organized, I group the data into zip files. I even zip uncompressible data such as jpegs and zip files. (To keep from wasting time, I specify no compression for these files.) This has the accidental benefit of not marking the individual files as read-only when you finalize the CD-R.

You'll remember that I'm old. I've created a couple of .bat files to run PKZIP. When I first set this up, I was specifying include and exclude parameters and had trouble with command buffer limits. I found an arcane version of PKZIP called "PKZIP(R) Command Line Version 4.0." The file name is pkzc400s.exe and you can find it at http://www.cmdtools.com/. The command line options are different than the old PKZIP but I've pretty well forgotten those so it's not a big deal. This version also supports long file names so things look pretty when you restore.

I still use Outlook Express. To find where those files are located, open Outlook Express. Go to File/Import/Messages. Highlight your version of Outlook Express and click Next. Then click on Main Identity and click on Ok. There's where your files are. Copy this and paste into Windows Explorer's Address and press Enter. That'll show you the names of the folder files. The address book is easier to find. See my .bat files below.

After the zip files have been created, the .bat file runs an attrib command to reset all the archive bits. Then the .bat file copies in winzip.exe so the set of files is basically self-defining.

As I said earlier, I started off creating sets that would fit on CD-Rs. After I bought a DVD burner and blank DVD+Rs dropped below $.50, I've gone to DVD+Rs. Takes all the worry out of creating sets of files. Now I just create 2 sets, one with my pictures and the other with everything else. Each set fits on a DVD+R.

To make the whole process run faster, I write the zip files to my hard drive and then copy them to the DVD+Rs. Then I leave the zip files on the hard drive until next month so I have a ready backup in case I delete something I didn't mean to.

When I've finished copying the zip files to the DVD+Rs, I take these disks to another PC and have WinZip verify the archives.

When I described this process to some guys at work, they pointed out the risk of a scratch on the media rendering a large zip file unreadable. I hadn't thought of this. I went back and implemented PKZIP spanning to break the files into 20.8 MB chunks. There’s nothing magic about this size, just one of PKZIP's default values. Then to allow me to recreate the set should one or more not be readable, I create a set of PAR(ity) files using QuickPar from http://www.quickpar.org.uk/. As I currently have plenty of space left on each DVD+R, I just set the size of the PAR files so that the creation takes about an hour. How arbitrary is that?

I've looked at doing incremental backups but it doesn't seem worth the effort. Periodically, I'd still have to take a baseline and then I'd have to keep up with the incrementals. Since I do this on the first of each month, it only costs me $1 per month so I wouldn't save anything. I keep the latest set of backups at work just in case.

Here's what the files look like:

dvd1.bat

: ACDSee32
: Address Book
: download
: Outlook Express
: Start Menu All Users
: Start Menu Ben Moore
: The HTML Reference Library
: uft
: My Documents (except My Pictures and My Videos)
: Games
: Juno
: QuickenB
: Backup System State
pause Have you backed up the system state and closed OutlookExpress?
:
cd c:\program files\pkware\pkzipc
:
set cdr=c:\backup\dvd1:set cdr=e::
: ACDSee32
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%ACDSee32.zip" "C:\Program Files\ACDSee32\*.*"
: Address Book
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%Address Book.zip" "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book\Ben Moore.wab"
: download
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=0 -attr=all -span=20.8 -excl="C:\download\archive\*.*" "%cdr%Download.zip" "C:\download\*.*"
: Outlook Express
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%Outlook Express.zip" "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{4B7CEB2F-1892-443B-B4A8-DA8CDD99A31E}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\*.*"
: Start Menu All Users
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%Start Menu All Users.zip" "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\*.*"
: Start Menu Ben Moore
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%Start Menu Ben Moore.zip" "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Start Menu\*.*"
: The HTML Reference Library
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%The HTML Reference Library.zip" "C:\The HTML Reference Library\*.*"
: uft
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%Uft.zip" "C:\uft\*.*"
: My Documents (except My Pictures and My Videos)
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -excl="C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\My Pictures\*.*" -excl="C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\My Videos\*.*" -excl="C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\Ulead DVD MovieFactory\*.*" -excl="C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\Pinnacle Studio\*.*" -span=20.8 "%cdr%My Documents.zip" "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\*.*"
: Games
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%Games.zip" "C:\games\*.*"
: Juno
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 -excl="C:\Program Files\Juno\ADS\*.*" "%cdr%Juno.zip" "C:\Program Files\Juno\*.*"
: QuickenB
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%QuickenB.zip" "C:\QuickenB\*.*"
: Backup System State
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=5 -attr=all "%cdr%Backup System State.zip" "c:\Backup System State.bkf"
copy "c:\download\winzip8.exe" "%cdr%"
:
:dir %cdr%
:
cd ..
:
pause Press any key to reset the archive bits
:
attrib -a /s /d "C:\Program Files\ACDSee32\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book\Ben Moore.wab"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\download\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{4B7CEB2F-1892-443B-B4A8-DA8CDD99A31E}\Microsoft\Outlook Express\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\The HTML Reference Library\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\uft\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\games\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\Program Files\Juno\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\QuickenB\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "c:\Backup System State.bkf"
:
pause Press any key to finish

dvd2.bat

: My Pictures
: My Videos
cd "c:\program files\pkware\pkzipc"
:
set cdr=c:\backup\dvd2:set cdr=e::
: My Pictures
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=0 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%My Pictures.zip" "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\My Pictures\*.*"
: My Videos
pkzipc -add -rec -dir=root -lev=0 -attr=all -span=20.8 "%cdr%My Videos.zip" "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\My Videos\*.*"
:
copy "c:\download\winzip8.exe" "%cdr%"
:dir %cdr%
:
cd ..
:
pause Press any key to reset the archive bits
:
attrib -a /s /d "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\My Pictures\*.*"
attrib -a /s /d "C:\Documents and Settings\Ben Moore\My Documents\My Videos\*.*"
:
pause Press any key to finish

Home Theatre PC - Follow-up

I've had my HTPC running since early August. Overall, it's exceeding my expectations. It does crash more often than I'd like but it does great at creating files that I can burn to CDs or DVDs.

Here's the scoop on what I built. I added a Lite-On DVD-/+R burner for about $50 and a Syntax USB 802.11b adapter that was free after rebate. I used RealVNC to remotely control it. I built it with a monitor and keyboard attached and got the wireless working. Then I unplugged the monitor and keyboard and haven't looked back. It sits next to the TV cabinet behind a flower arrangement. My first choice was to put it inside the cabinet but I couldn't move the DVD/VCR to where the ShowStopper used to be. Then I tried to put it behind the cabinet. It fit there but it crashed more than before so I think it got too hot.

It was a bear to get setup. There were 2 major problems. First, it didn't come with any kind of a manual. Second, it came with backlevel drivers for the Hauppauge PVR-350. With the original drivers, it locked up almost every time you recorded something. Updating the drivers broke most everything. It took some head scratching to get the PVR-350's TV-out working by just guessing. I also had to turn off the rendering of the TV picture to the PC video-out so it wouldn't overwhelm the RealVNC wireless connection.

The only good thing to say about the support is that the Sage forum is wonderful. e-mail to Sage's technical support got response in a day or two but they recommended me to install an unsupported skin!

Here's a shot of the LiveTV Guide.


Notice the channel logos. They don't come with the bundle but there's a link to them on the forum. I had to create some of them but that wasn't difficult. The other thing to point out is the yellow border on the news at 10. That border indicates that it is a "favorite." You can specify "favorites" to be recorded on any channel or on a specific channel and how many shows to keep.

Here's the SageTV Recordings screen:


There're the logos again. When you select one of the shows, you get this very detailed screen:


You can see that there's an arrow at the bottom indicating more data. That includes information like the recording resolution (more in a little bit) and file name and location.

Jumping back to "favorites," here's what the Favorites detail looks like:


There're so many more screens that I haven't included. If you have any specific questions, drop me an e-mail, and I'll send you the screen shots.

Now to talk about resolutions. I fretted over my elusive Half-D1 resolution. I tried and tried to make my own encoding specification for Half-D1 to no avail. With no documentation, it was hard. Finally, I stumbled over the fact that CVD (Chinese Video Disk) resolution is Half-D1. That is buried way down on this page. That resolution is a standard in SageTV so I've made it my default. For an hour show, it creates a file that is 1.25 GB (1,3xx,xxx bytes). That will let you get 3+ hours on a DVD even without editing out the commercials. For half hour shows (like the news), I use SVCD Standard Play. That creates a file of about 5xx,xxx bytes for a half hour. This fits nicely on a CD and looks "good enough" on my 27" Sony Wega.

The Hauppauge card comes with uLead DVD MovieFactory 2 SE. This is good and bad. The good thing about it is that it is the only DVD authoring program that I've found that realizes that Half-D1 is a standard resolution for DVDs and won't reencode them. Reencoding will really cause degradation of the image. The bad is that if you even think about just trimming the front or back of the video, it will reencode the WHOLE thing. Damn. So close, yet so far. Hauppauge has a program you can download to edit the MPEG before you send it to an authoring program but I haven't tried it yet. You just open the videos in MovieFactory and it just works. No demultiplexing or worries about sound synchronization. Wonderful.

The remote doesn't seem to be able to operate anything but the SageTV so I'm back to multiple remotes. I'm not sure that this is all it can do since it doesn't come with a manual (have I mentioned this before?).

Overall the thing works great. I can record a ton of shows and burn to CDs or DVDs the ones I want to keep or share and they work fine. With CDs basically free and DVDs less that $.50, they're almost give-aways.

Oh, the crashing. Even with the new drivers, it still crashes about once a week. It almost always crashes at the end of playing back a program. I suspect that it is aggravated by recording while I'm playing back but that's not always the case. Putting it in "Sleep" mode reduces the frequency dramatically. It can still record programs while it is asleep. When it crashes, I just press and hold the power button and it comes right back up.

You really CAN get a virus from looking at porn!

Gartner: No Quick Fix for Microsoft’s JPEG-Handling Vulnerability

The Inquirer: More flaws found in Microsoft Windows

The Register: Microsoft warns of poisoned picture peril

eWeek: Microsoft Graphics Bug Threatens Systems

Craig Schmugar, virus research manager at McAfee, ... "Often, the release of the patch itself leads to exploits, as attackers reverse-engineer the patch code in order to learn what it's fixing. Hopefully, it won't come to that."

That's comforting.

Here's how to find out if you're vulnerable and here's the "how-to" fix it.

His lips are moving!

When I saw this article: IBM does Linux-only dance on Power, I just had to unload. The title of this post is the punch line to the old joke, "How can you tell when an IBM salesman is lying?"

I've been involved with IBM computers since the late '60s (don't do the math). I've spent lots of time in the Hudson Valley (beautiful place) talking with the mainframe folks and more recently the RS/6000 folks.

We had started with SAP on RS/6000 SP2s in the mid-'90s. What a fiasco. Our regional IBM sales manager was Gary L. from Charlotte. He had been in the Tennessee area and was very familiar with our shop. We quickly outgrew the capacity of the SP2s and had to move to free-standing boxes loosing the use of the SP2's high-speed switch (about its only advantage). In the late '90s we tried and tried to convince our management to let us quit throwing good money after bad with the RS/6000s and go to Sun or HP. Our CIO said that IBM was our "partner" and they would look out for us. We spent boatloads of money on RS/6000 equipment and suffered outage after outage on top of poor performance. All the while, IBM was pulling the resources out of our account one by one.

Finally, in '99, the RS/6000 S70A database server died and wouldn't reboot. They shipped us another one from the plant and it wouldn't power up. We built-up another one and got the system limping after 36 hours. We had to ship the boot drive to Austin for them to tell us what was wrong. It was an AIX bug.

This time when we went to management to replace the RS/6000 database server with anything else, they let us. We installed a Sun E10000 and you just wouldn't have believed the difference, both with the vendor and with the hardware.

But this was just the database server. The rest of the landscape remained on the old RS/6000 boat anchors. Then just over 2 years ago, we did an RFP to replace all the machines we were using to run SAP.

By now that IBM regional rep. was the Worldwide VP of RS/6000 sales! I told you we bought a lot of that stuff. IBM was in their transition from the S-series into the P-series (they were always transitioning from something to something else obsoleting all the equipment you'd just bought) and AIX 5l. The more we talked to them, the more I worried about their commitment to AIX. Our "partner" Gary came to Memphis and I asked him about that. Remember he was the Worldwide VP of RS/6000 sales. He stood in our office and told us that IBM would never abandon AIX. Now go read this article and visualize his lips moving.

PS. We awarded the deal to Sun and now have a homogeneous Sun environment. Thanks Gilly!

Shorthorn

Here's a good article on Microsoft's Longhorn. You have to consider that the source could be slightly biased but it still has some interesting history of Microsoft's problems with delivering what they promise when they promise.

USB Flash Drive + CD-RW Functionality

While researching whether I could make a USB flash drive autorun, I came across this from Hagiwara Sys-Com.


Pretty neat! When you insert it, you get 2 drive letters. One looks like your typical USB flash drive but the other looks like a CD drive. That means that Windows will look for an autorun.inf file and execute it. Think about that for a second.

I found it at MobilePlanet for $49.95 + $6.95 shipping. I may have to try one of these.

How To Safely Store And Manage Passwords

I heard a scary story last night about a guy who had had his eBay and yahoo e-mail userids and passwords cracked. This sent me back on an old quest for a password manager. I ran across this article from Fred Langa and started chasing these programs.

As always, I went to sourceforge.net first. Here I found keepass. I installed it and played with it. It is nice but... You have to copy and paste the userid and password into each field. So I kept on looking.

Looking for how to autorun a USB flash drive (more on this later), I stumbled across KeyPass. This looks so much like keepass but... It has a scripting capability where you can define a hot key (default is CTRL + right click) in the userid field and it will type the userid and password and hit ENTER.

KeyPass is free for up to 10 userid/password combinations and CompUSA has it for $25.93.

I'm almost there. Now if I could just get my USB flash drive to autorun.

oldversion.com

Don't you wish you still had that old version of QuickTime that didn't have the nag screen? Now you can get it back. Just go to OldVersion.com and see if they have what you're looking for.

Maybe if I just keep my hands in my pockets...

...I won't be at risk for IE vulnerabilities like this. I wonder about something like SecuireIE (I know that's practically an oxymoron). I found this review. Kinda middle-of-the-road. Doesn't sound like $30 worth.

Internet Explorer has a number of security features that users can customize to protect themselves as they surf the Web. Unfortunately many, if not most, of these features are disabled by default and require the user to do some research and some clicking around to find what they need to configure them. Winferno SecureIE automates the default security settings and grants the user significantly easier access to customizing these features as they go. Blocking Pop-up ads, ActiveX scripts and such requires 5 to 10 different clicks in Internet Explorer. SecureIE lets you turn these functions on or off at the click of a button on the main screen. There are also other productivity features that make this a worthwhile product for many users.

Here's another review from PCWorld. Fairly positive. It mentions pluses like tabbed browsing and minuses like "browsing the Internet through a Word document."

I haven't taken this (right click and "Save Target as") apart but it seems to be some of what SecureIE has. The write-up is here. I don't know enough about the registry entries to comment. It has a lot of web sites hard-coded though.

PS. I went to look some more at www.secureie.com. You gotta wonder about an organization that has a link of "javascript:screenShot('secureie_shot_01.aspx', 'SecureIEShot1', 606, 781)." This gives you a window that is taller than a 1024x768 screen and doesn't have scroll bars. Use this link if you want to see the screen shot.

Infected in 20 minutes

The Register recently ran an article on how quickly a new PC will get infected when attached to the Internet. It's worth reading the whole thing but I'm going to excerpt some of it here.

Opinion What normally happens within twenty minutes? That's how long your average unprotected PC running Windows XP, fresh out of the box, will last once it's connected to the Internet.

Problems! Solutions?

The SANS Institute Internet Storm Center released those eye-opening numbers a few days ago. Go take a look at their graph, and you'll note that the current time of 20 minutes is half that of what it was a year ago, although, to be fair, the average has been both higher and lower - over an hour last Christmas and only about 15 minutes in the spring. That hour at Christmas seems like an aberration, and the overall trend has definitely been downward, towards far shorter times before your Windows box is not really yours any longer.

As the SANS Institute notes, 20 minutes is not long enough to update your Windows PC before it is too late. If you take a new PC out of the box, plug it in to the Internet, and power it on, most people (most people? OK - a lot of people. Uh, alright - some people. Erm ... *sigh*. A few people. Happy?) know enough to immediately hie thee over to Windows Update and get the latest patches from Microsoft. Then reboot. And get more patches. And reboot. Ad infinitum. Oh, and don't leave out the latest anti-virus updates either. Gotta have those. Oh oh oh - don't forget Windows XP Service Pack 2, the gotta-have update from Microsoft, which "may be as small as 70 megabytes (MB) or as large as 260 MB".

The SANS Institute tries to help by offering a free download of a great little 1.2 MB PDF wonderfully titled, "Windows XP: Surviving the First Day" (makes XP sound like a communicable disease, doesn't it?

Oh, if you run your PC behind a router/firewall, you've got until you open your first web page or html-enabled e-mail to get the patches on.

Go Phish!

Everytime I read something like this, I try to run Firefox again. That gives me fits. First, the google toolbar doesn't install. Yeah, Firefox has it's own version but it's pitiful compared to the real thing. blogger's wysiwyg editor doesn't work with Firefox. My company's Internet employee portal doesn't work. (This isn't really a problem with Firefox. The code just doesn't allow Firefox even though it works.) It goes without saying that Windows Update doesn't work. The web site I'm working on doesn't render the same with Firefox as IE. (Yes, I'm creating it with FrontPage.) The list goes on and on. Help, either in the product or on their web site, is non-existant. The forums are full of coders who wax on about coding but not about how to use the product.

Maybe someday...

Wal-Mart - Your Technology Center?

Here's an interesting article: Technology Review: An Alternative to Windows (when you get the registration screen, revisit this).

It's fascinating. Not only is Linux competing for the consumer desktop but it's amazing how much technology is showing up in soccer mom kinds of places like Wal-Mart. Just yesterday, I needed (or thought I did) an S-video cable. So like I used to have to do, I went to Radio Shack. Their $20+ price for a Monster cable turned me off so I went literally next door to Wal-Mart. They had the same Monster brand (in less flashy packaging) for $12.

I thought Wal-Mart was going to take away the photo-finishing business from Walgreens but then Walgreens jumped ahead with the Fuji kiosk. This sweet little gadget is single-handedly going to kill film.

The ultimate proof of geekdom reaching the masses was a month or so ago when one of the consumer electronic stores (e.g. BestBuy, CompUSA) ran a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box in their weekly newspaper ad.

Praying mantises kill their mates after screwing them. Gates keeps them alive.

This is a very interesting article from wired. Like one of my ex-Microsoft friends said, "They don't call us the Evil Empire for nothing."

Techbargains.com

Techbargains.com - If you haven't found this place you should. I'm very frugal. Ok, I'm cheap. I shop all the Sunday morning newspaper flyers for bargains even when I don't need anything. Today I was looking for an 802.11b networking kit for one of Sha's friends. I found this on techbargains.com.


While it's not free, $20 ain't bad.

While building my HTPC, I used techbargains.com to locate a DVD burner for $49 and an 802.11b USB adapter for $0.

It looks like this guy makes his money by setting up referrer accounts with the retailers. The link above uses a "jump" from his site. I presume that this logs the referral from his site TO the retailer's site and he gets some kind of cut from them. Who cares? We get the low price without having to crawl all over the web or get our fingers black from flipping through all those newspaper flyers!

HP Omnibook 300

 
I've always been a fan of ultra lightweight laptops. This started back in the early 1990s when I bought an HP Omnibook 300. This puppy weighed 3 pounds and ran the new Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Office. It ran a 386SX in real mode, i.e. it didn't use a page file. Windows ran on top of a hacked version of MS-DOS 5 with an early copy of DriveSpace (from MS-DOS 6) which doubled the usable space of the 40 MB (yes, that's not a typo) hard drive. The good news was that none of that 40 MB was used for operating system or application. The operating system and Office were on a 10 MB execute-in-place flash card.

It used a 640x480 monochrome screen and had an open PCMCIA slot for a modem or NIC. It was "instant on" in that it worked much like Windows 2000/XP's hibernate/resume except it didn't dump to the hard drive. Click, it's on. Click, it's off. It had a cute little mouse that popped out on a stick from the side. The battery life was 5+ hours. I could run mine 2 days before charging.

HP's retrospective on it is here.

I went on to IBM ThinkPads including a 560, a 240, a 600, and most recently my beloved X20. My recent company issued laptop from Texas doesn't hold a candle to the ThinkPads. At home, I'm pure ThinkPads with an inventory of 2 760s, 3 600s, and a T20.