Linuxlore

Windows crashed

Author: Paul Tansom

OK, that’s not a particularly unusual occurrence, but this has been one of the more unusual crashes for me. Earlier this morning I went to the Windows machine to burn an ISO image. It’s not that Linux isn’t capable, or that Windows does it better, just that unfortunately at the moment most of my machines are in pieces and the one with the CD burner has an old and flaky Windows XP install on it.

Anyway, I had misplaced the Knoppix ISO file that I was going to use, got distracted and only got back to the machine later in the afternoon. Not a major problem, bar the fact that this machine tends to sulk if it is left unused and crash (its days are numbered once I get my other machines built!). This time all initially seemed well though, bar the fact that there was a message telling me that other users were logged on and was I sure I wanted to shutdown. Well, I was the only user logged on and I hadn’t asked for a shutdown. In addition to this I only download updates, so nothing should have happened automatically (although after a recent run in with Windows Genuine Advantage and several exchanges with Microsoft I did find their ‘fix’ had enabled automatic updates as a side effect a while back!).

So I told the computer not to continue and proceeded to locate the ISO. Unfortunately the computer was apparently still shutting down as each application vanished in turn and I was then logged off. That would have been merely annoying and resulted in an investigation as to what had triggered the shutdown, but I was left on the login screen. Well almost the login screen anyway. There was no ‘turn off the computer’ button (this is a family machine and hence uses the login screen with the picture for each user – great for kids). The other problem was that, even with valid passwords, I could not login to any account.

Well the machine got left for a while, another distraction, and when I returned there was a very old style password prompt to unlock the screen. Once I had done this I simply had a desktop background with nothing else, but I was able to bring up the task manager and reboot from there.

All this seems suspicious activity, but my anti-virus / anti-malware / anti-etc. software is up to date, and scans using it and online tools don’t show up anything. I also don’t use Internet Explorer or Outlook Express and am patched right up to date bar 3 items from Windows / Microsoft update. The three items are .Net 3.5 which fails to install because it fails the pre-requisite of .Net 3.5 being installed (?!), Internet Explorer 8 (which for some reason is a high priority update and not an upgrade), and Silverlight. This last one is both of no interest and incompatible with my CPU! I know it is incompatible because it is a requirement for viewing some of the information Microsoft told me look at regarding my WGA problem, so I did actually try to install it.

Oh well, all the more reason to replace the machine and use Linux

June 1st, 2009  |  Posted in Computers, Windows  |  No Comments »

School IT education

Author: Paul Tansom

I’ll start this post off by stating that I’m not having a go at any specific school with my comments here, least of all the one that my son attends, and that I attended too many years ago to mention. My sons school is, in fact, a very good school, and I’m not just saying that because I am now a governor

That said, let’s move on…

The other day my son came home and asked if he could use the computer. Nothing spectacularly unusual there, but shortly after logging on he came back to me asking if we had “the big blue W” on it somewhere. After a brief to and fro I ascertained that what he meant was Microsoft Word and that he wanted to show me something that he had done at school.

There’s a few points here. Firstly there is the comparison with when I was his age (he is seven). Back then I still had around 6 years until the ZX81 was launched and I got my first taste of computers. Now they are not only everywhere, but interconnected to the point where it didn’t even occur to him that the work he had been doing at school wouldn’t be accessible from home – bless him.

Secondly there’s the annoyance that from such an early age the ‘big blue W’ and Microsoft Word are synonymous with word processing. I keep trying to tell myself that he is only seven and they need to keep things simple, but it is still irritating. The end result of this was that I sat down and explained what a word processor was, and that even though I didn’t have the one he used at school I did have another one. I was encouraged by the fact that, when presented with OpenOffice he set straight to work trying to reproduce the same sort of document he had at school, and did so with no help at all – beyond a brief grumble that there wasn’t much clipart! (actually I did show him where that was).

The next question baffled me a bit, “do we have the internet?”. My response was to tell him that we did, and that he used it regularly! Then we headed down a familiar road, “no I mean the big blue e” So off we went down the explanation of what a browser was and that he was already quite comfortable using both Opera and Firefox, as was his younger brother (who is 3). In fact they are both rather too good at some of the games on the CBeebies, Nick Jr and BBC Dr Who websites! Still, they are also quite happy playing with Frozen Bubble or Tux Paint

Tags: education, Linux, Windows
July 15th, 2008  |  Posted in Linux, Windows  |  No Comments »

No sign of foxes

Author: Paul Tansom

Sadly there seems to be no sign of our regular foxes this year. For a good few years now we’ve had cubs playing in our back garden by now, but we’ve not seen or heard any yet, so we fear the worst.

Earlier this year when I was chatting to a friend who lost their dog to having eaten something poisoned, which was thought to have been put down for foxes. That’s pretty unpleasant on both counts – somebodies pet was killed, and there seems little justification for killing foxes to me, but there’s no accounting for some people.

The first fox in our garden goes back a good few years now, and sadly we dubbed him Basil. There was a bit more to the name than simply being a fox though. When he first appeared I was doing some painting in the garden and he crept up and nicked my paintbrush!

There’s some shots that should convince most that foxes are loveable creatures in our family photo gallery.

Tags: fox, garden
July 1st, 2008  |  Posted in General  |  No Comments »

Firefox 3 first thoughts

Author: Paul Tansom

Well I’ve only been using Firefox 3 for a very, very short while, but thought I’d make a few notes on my initial thoughts. I’ve not tried the beta or release candidate versions at all, so this is a real first impression.

To start with it is worth noting that I’ve only installed the Windows version, since I’m suffering using Microsoft on the desktop for a while. This is partly due to a couple of hardware failures, partly office reorganisations that are as yet unfinished, and partly forcing myself to keep my hand in – unfortunately I have to.

The first thing I noticed was that it was much faster and more responsive. Firefox 2 has, particularly in the past few weeks, been pausing for periods for no apparent reason. The second observation was that the memory footprint was much, much smaller, so this may well be linked. I tend to use a reasonable number of tabs when browsing and have been keeping an eye on the memory usage recently. I’ve been trimming things down to around 12 open tabs at a time and was amazed that Firefox was using between 200M and 260M, with no sign of reducing when tabs were closed. After installing Firefox 3 I checked and found that it was running at pretty much exactly half that, around 100M to 130M with the same 12 tabs as before the upgrade!

Part of this reduced footprint may be down to the few extensions that are now disabled due to incompatibility. With a major upgrade it is probably time to take a look through the extensions I’m using to see if any are no longer relevant. A few quick highlights of my extension usage are…

Bookmark Sync and Sort – sadly this is no longer compatible, and from a quick investigation it hasn’t been updated for a good while now, and the referenced home page has gone. Time to look for an alternative it seems. All this was doing was backing up my bookmarks to a WebDav folder on my intranet server, and at first glance there seems to be no obvious alternative. With a bit more digging I’ve found two, or perhaps just the one, options:

• Foxmarks – I ignored this first time round since it was linked to a service, but further investigation shows that you can use it with either WebDav or FTP, as well as install a server component. The original Foxmarks was based on the OSAF Cosmo server, but it looks as though this has been replaced by the Chandler project, so a little more investigation is required.
• Sitebar – another one I passed over when finding Bookmark Sync and Sort. Again it is linked to a service, but it seems that you can download the server component if you want to. Sadly, according the the Mozilla Addons site it doesn’t currently support Firefox 3, but it does have the advantage of being open source which Foxmarks doesn’t seem to be. Again, more investigation is required.

Firebug, IE Tab (remember this is on Windows!), It’s All Text!, Speed Dial and Web Developer are all available for Firefox 3, so that just leaves…

Tab Mix Plus – not having this one is a bit painful, although partly because I’m not sure what features I’m missing that were part of it and what may now be officially available that I haven’t found yet! That said, I’ve just noted that there is a newer version, just not listed on the Mozilla Addons site. I’ll have to give it a try and then work out what options I’m using that it provides – the session manager, the new tab button and undo closed tabs spring to mind.

There are a couple of other incompatible ones listed on my install. Google Photos Screensaver I think I had disabled anyway and RealPlayer Browser Plugin I hadn’t noticed before – although is probably responsible for blindingly easy downloads from YouTube etc.

That’s what leaps out at me, bar the slight interface changes. No doubt more differences will become obvious over time.

Tags: Firefox, Linux, Windows
June 18th, 2008  |  Posted in Computers, Linux, Web, Windows  |  No Comments »

Bizarre Windows bug of the day

Author: Paul Tansom

Windows is weird. I know any software can have the odd bug and behave in an unexpected fashion, but Windows really does do bugs and glitches better than anyone else. It is exceptionally good at doing something strange that you can’t quite fathom, and after the traditional helpdesk fix of rebooting you’ll possibly never see it again – in spite of the fact that the error in the code is still there. From my personal experience with the other operating systems I’ve used, when you find a bug situation it is generally repeatable and a reboot doesn’t fix it, but I’m rashly generalising there!!

Anyway, the oddment for today went something like this:

I’ve been in Windows XP doing some work for most of the day without problems. Well, other than the horribly cumbersome and unfriendly user interface that is, but that’s another issue! I then locked the screen and headed of to pick up my son from school. On returning I unlocked the screen with a view to carrying on with some work, but all was not well…

I run a dual screen setup, and the left screen seemed fine. The right screen was not so happy though. The icons along the left hand side of the screen had moved across about a quarter of the width and any windows that were maximised only used the right three quarters of the screen. Oddly the Start menu came up in the correct place at the bottom right of the screen, and any windows moved between screens still used the left quarter of the screen.

I’m afraid I couldn’t be bothered to investigate further and simply rebooted. I’ve long since given up on trying to solve Windows problems that don’t survive a reboot or repeat easily. It just isn’t worth the hassle. Conversely if I get a bug in Linux I want to know why. I guess I’ve just grown to expect Windows to crash and present bugs on a semi regular basis. Has Microsoft created a culture of accepting sub standard products? Thought for another post perhaps!

Tags: bug, screen, Windows
April 3rd, 2008  |  Posted in Computers, Windows  |  No Comments »

Damn the spam

Author: Paul Tansom

Don’t you just hate spam. It is bad enough having to filter out spam that is being sent to you, but last night I was the unfortunate recipient of another wholly more annoying form of spam. That’s the sort when your email address has been used by a spam bot somewhere as the sending address for a batch of junk mail. Now sadly there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this. You could not tell anyone your address and never use it, then, so long as it isn’t one that may be tried at random, it probably won’t be used by anyone sending spam. That sort of defeats the object though. If your email address ends up in somebody’s address book (and we are pretty much talking Windows and Outlook here), or is referenced on a public website, then there is a risk of it being harvested.

So last night I received just over 1000 bounce messages in one of a variety of formats and languages – from mailbox full, through notifications that the person has left the company, to requests to validate the message manually, and others. With my current ‘in limbo’ mail setup I also ended up with another 1000 or so frozen messages in my mail queue. I really must sort that out. I guess it would be worth looking into the spam filtering too, since surely if the message is included in the return then it should be possible to filter it out automatically – another thing for my mail revamp to consider!

Tags: mail, Outlook, spam, Windows
March 28th, 2008  |  Posted in Computers  |  No Comments »

Broadband smoke and mirrors

Author: Paul Tansom

I’ve just been reading an article titled Broadband Britain cheaper and faster than ever on the Silicon website. Whilst it is true that prices have fallen and speeds have increased it started me thinking about how far things had progressed since I first got an internet connection.

I was quite a late starter for home internet, I didn’t get my first dial-up account until 1996. I had been using it at work since around 1990, but the urge to get it at home didn’t hit until later. By this time there was already talk about ‘broadband’, and I signed up with Demon Internet with the hope that the promised cable modems would be available quite soon – well, that’s what Nynex were promising. Sometime in the next 6 months they said. Nynex were taken over by Cable & Wireless and the 6 months promise was kept going through until 2001, so that’s about 5 years later! During that time I survived on 56k dial-up. In 2001 my employer paid for an ISDN line to be installed and things got a little better, although primarily due to the extra line and no online charges rather than the speed.

In late 2001 my employer decided to cease trading (a whole different story!), so I had the prospect of returning to dial-up. Thankfully this was about the same time as the ‘wires only’ trials started, so I switched from Demon to Nildram and went ADSL. This was at the beginning of 2002, so finally, 6 years later, I had a speed boost to 512k. The key thing about being ‘wires only’ was that I didn’t have the hassle of the nasty USB ‘frog’ that came with ADSL up until then, so it was an altogether more pleasant experience with Linux.

At that time the cost was a little over £30 a month, not cheap, but orders of magnitude cheaper than an equivalent ISDN package, and only a little more than dial-up with a flat charge instead of paying per minute – and with the added advantage of not tying up your phone line. If we fast forward now to 2007, about 5 years on, I was still with Nildram, I was still paying £30 a month and the speed was still 512k. Checks with BT indicated that the line, which runs for 2.89km from my local exchange, can only handle 512k. I was warned that if I switched to the new ADSL services that offered ‘up to 8Mb’ the line might ‘rate adapt’ to a lower speed than the 512k. Now in 2008 things haven’t changed on that line. My how far we have come with broadband speeds in the past 6 years!

To be fair you can get broadband cheaper now. This has been done in two ways as far as I can see. Firstly there’s the reduced specification packages – most people don’t want fixed IP addresses, etc.. Secondly there’s the bundled packages that are pretty much ‘lost leaders’ or ‘sweeteners’ for other services. I have also abandoned Nildram and moved to another supplier making a significant saving and getting 8 IP addresses instead of just the one (although I’ve not yet revamped my network to take full advantage of that).

Speed wise things have only really changed a little, and then only if you are pretty close to the exchange. Annoyingly, whilst I am 2.89km from my ‘local’ exchange, only a couple of hundred yards up the road people are 1.79km away from their ‘local’ exchange – a different one! My speed has improved though, by virtue of taking advantage of the old ISDN wiring for a second, business line. For some strange reason this is rated at 3.5Mb instead of the 512k of the line next to it on the wall. I know the cable from the telegraph pole is identical since it was replaced when the ISDN line was installed. Presumably there is something drastically different in the cable quality or route to the green box just down the road!

My home line has switched to a bundled service. I’m a little concerned that this may be ‘unbundled’ at some point, since I’ve read that it can be very difficult to re-bundle it if you need to. Unbundling would appear to have no real value to the end user, since it is the quality and length of the BT cable from the exchange that dictates the speed, and this is still the same, bundled or unbundled. I’ve noted that Newnet, a local company, are doing some unbundling and offering up to 24Mb, but having spoken to them I don’t see any likelihood that my 512k line will be any faster. Until BT upgrade their cabling things won’t improve. Ironically, nipping back to 2002 again briefly, I got a phone call from NTL offering me cable broadband a matter of weeks after going live with ADSL. As soon as they were honest enough to drop the ’6 months’ promise they finally delivered – a bit late though. Cable would seem to be the best option for faster speeds, but sadly in my area we are on Nynex cabling, which apparently is of poor quality, and NTL had no plans to upgrade it. It remains to be seen what Virgin Media will do with it.

Tags: ADSL, broadband, cable, ISP, Linux
February 4th, 2008  |  Posted in Computers, Web  |  No Comments »

Polydrama

Author: Paul Tansom

Isn’t Facebook a wonderful thing? When I first signed up I wasn’t entirely convinced it was really worth the effort, after all I’m not really that into the ‘social networking’ thing. After a few visits the site code behind it showed itself to be a bit on the unpredictable side with some very strange actions when navigating around it, which left me less than enthusiastic. That said, I get some very odd behaviour on eBay too. Both sites will insist that I download the php or cgi instead of actually executing it every now and then.

Still, Facebook is proving that it isn’t the quality of the code that is important, but that it’s all about who uses the site. Back in late November I, for some reason, got the urge to set up a few groups on Facebook to see who dropped by. One in particular has taken off, and that is the Polydrama one. For those that read this and don’t know, Polydrama was the drama group from the days when it was Portsmouth Polytechnic and not a University. Yes, this geek has other leanings too

So the main purpose of this post is to try and get a decent placing in Google for Polydrama, with a reference to Facebook and see who else can be found from the dim, distant and no doubt embarrassing past! If you don’t want to join Facebook, drop me a line directly to find out what’s happening.

As an aside, it is interesting to see that Facebook has managed something that Friends Reunited failed to do. I assume that there are those keen to track down old friends and willing to invest in doing so, who found Friends Reunited a good vehicle, whereas others find the free nature of Facebook suites the initial idle curiosity that then snowballs… or maybe it’s just a matter of timing

Now what I need to do is dig through the boxes of old photos and get to work with the scanner. I think I’ve got a video somewhere too, so more stuff to try transferring onto DVD!

Tags: Facebook, Polydrama, Portsmouth, Theatre
January 17th, 2008  |  Posted in Theatre  |  No Comments »

Windows multi-user multitasking?

Author: Paul Tansom

I have to be honest and state up front that I haven’t yet given Windows Vista a serious workout, so Microsoft may have actually produced a system that properly manages multiple users and multitasks sensibly. As of Windows XP patched up to date they haven’t managed it though. Let’s look at a few of examples of things that still niggle me on a daily basis when using XP.

1. First off let’s start with something simple. Whatever a window on the screen is doing you should be able to move it around so you can get it out of the way if necessary. Well sadly Windows XP still cannot manage this properly. You will frequently find that when a Windows pops up another window for a sub task of the parent window will be locked in place, unable to move until the task has finished. Perhaps the most annoying example of locking a window in place is the Winzip self extractor. If you happen to be unzipping a large file using this and click on it to drag it somewhere out of the way it asks you if you want to ‘Abort unzip operation?’.
2. Next let’s look at drivers, specifically a wireless networking driver from USR. Now unfortunately the driver in question, and other wireless networking drivers I’ve tried on Windows, run under a user account and not as a service. Presumably this is to allow the security information to be secured, but in practice it can cause problems in a multi user system. In this case the problem is if a non-privileged user logs on the networking will not work, so you are forced to give at least some administrative privileges to the user, thereby reducing the security of the system. Either that or you have to log on as an administrator to start the networking each time the system is used
3. Lastly a quick look at internal messaging. I have a wireless print server from 3Com that has one of my printers attached to it. When it there is a problem with it things can get a bit confusing, and the first few times I had problems it took me a while to work out what was going on. Basically if there is a message to pop up to tell you about an error, usually the fact that the server is not responding for some reason (often I’ve forgotten to switch it on!), you don’t always see it. The reason for this, I’ve found out, is that the pop up message will appear on whichever user desktop logged onto the machine first, and not necessarily the one that sent the print job. I spent a good while trying to debug why a print job wasn’t printing before I stumbled across the reason by switching to the user account that had the message popped up on the desktop!

Now clearly there will be those that consider that these problems are down to the individual applications or drivers and nothing to do with Windows itself. The fact remains, though, that there are many such badly written applications, so at least some of the blame has to lay at the feet of Microsoft. I’ve not covered applications that don’t seem to be able to decide which screen to use
when using multiple monitors, or the nightmare of windows sitting underneath the taskbar if you dare to put it at the top of the screen! There must be something inherent in Windows programming that encourages these errors. Some of it is probably the way it has grown up from DOS and is based on a system that had no concept of networks, users or even a GUI. There is a lot of Windows legacy holding it back. That said, Linux, BSD, Unix, etc. have managed to evolve better, to my mind anyway, all be it they had a much more solid foundation on which to build.

Tags: multitask, printer, Windows, wireless
January 16th, 2008  |  Posted in Computers, Windows  |  No Comments »