Archive for ‘Computing’ Category
 Posted on 20:21, August 21st, 2009 by Strangely
Windows 7 Ultimate Install
To say that I’m seriously impressed is an understatement!
Having an MSDN subscription confers certain benefits, but for most Microsoft stuff that I have to use, it’s usually an exercise in teeth-gritting somewhere from the banal to the infuriating as I plod on through.
My personal experience of Vista comes into the latter which is why I’ve never used it and have stuck with XP… like most professionals in the Windows camp have done.
Windows Experience 2.0
 Win7 1st install showing it working on minimal system specifications Having only 2 x 256MB memory sticks in my old main-board, and because of it’s on-board graphics there’s only 383MB spare for the operating system, I installed the thing onto a bit of spare hard-drive (an old Samsung 160GB IDE) and was amazingly surprised by the ease of the install…
- XP is still there and appears on the new boot menu.
- Networking worked out of the box and I flipped between the configurations with absolute ease.
- All the drivers were installed straight from the Microsoft website:
- ATI Radeon system and graphics
- Realtek sound and network
- Once drivers were updated, the monitor was detected and set up automatically.
- The networked HP All-in-One printer installed in seconds…
- The new taskbar/start-menu right-click pinning works like a charm.
- IE8 is installed by default and Firefox can be installed and defaulted without any bother
- I even like the new way of classifying user files and the concept of “libraries” is intuitive and easy to use and understand.
Absolutely amazing – even the aero interface works!
 Windows 7 system requirements For a bit extra speed, the aero has been turned off in the “Themes” area. Also, I don’t actually like it that much, but that’s just me I guess. More importantly, my system is well below the Microsoft Minimum System Requirements – I only installed it for a laugh and to see what would happen!
You’ll see in the screen-dump above, (which contrasts markedly with the Microsoft Minimum recommendations), that windows rates the system as 2.0 – it recommends 3.0 for the Aero interface. What I plan to do is stick 1GB of memory in the spare slots from my other PC, and then put new giblets in that one’s box. I intend to make that one a 4-core 64-bit platform to play with this new Microsoft OS…. Reaper should work fantastically!
Windows Experience
It’s truly an order of magnitude better than Vista and 5x better than XP!
In actual fact, it’s more like the jump from 3.1 to Win98. I have actually been smiling at how good it is! The effort Microsoft has put in seems to have been worth it – this same install that I’ve just done is supposed to work on netbooks with ARM processors! In fact, the claim that file-copying is faster on a Win7 Arm laptop than WinXP is probably true – I just copied several gigs of user files from the old partition which went extremely quickly.
All this copying was done after installing Office 2007 Ultimate and ESET’s NOD32 antivirus software (which works much better than on WinXP, by the way). Microsoft’s Defender is installed and runs by default – it’s a spyware catcher and doesn’t seem to slow stuff up.
However, to show how impressed I am, the copying was done while Windows/Microsoft Update downloaded ~300MB of updates!!! Before the copying was finished, the long process (about 20mins) of installing the updates had begun…
This is some serious disc and processor activity, I can tell you – and all done on a single 64-bit processor running in 32-bit mode in 383 of system memory! It never missed a beat or got confused once!
In fact, during the copying, it prompts for Videos/Pictures & Music, which were previously in the \My Documents\My Music\ etc path to go into their correct library!….. It’s the little touches like this, plus the sensible ease of installing programs (goodbye to Vista mad-clickitty-click HELL) that has put oodles of polish onto an already robust and comforting experience.
Conclusion
- I’m typing this as Win7 is de-fragmenting the old partition.
- I’m doing it from within Firefox (running the Web-Developer, Screengrab and British Dictionary plugins)….
……so you’ll guess that I’m impressed by this serious bit of software kit. With another Gig of Crucial Ballistix memory it should fly even more and be good for another three years!
Finally: Never in a million years could I have dreamed of praising Microsoft so much!!!
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Posted on 02:22, August 10th, 2009 by Strangely
Introduction & History
Recently, Microsoft has reworked it’s search engine (MSN Live Search) and renamed it Bing. This was followed even more recently, with a joint venture between itself and former search king Yahoo! into a hazily explained search and advertising combination.
 Microsoft is well known for wheeling out the lawyers as backup to it’s long-running scheming that batters any competition into the ground. I’m thinking particularly about the Netscape battle here…
Netscape, of course, although winning the final battle, lost the war and is no more. But it’s technical expertise re-surfaced as the Phoenix browser, whose modern name is Firefox.
 An advertising and search war has been extant ever since Google shot to prominence because it… er… gave better search results! Microsoft has had umpteen attempts at catch up or smash down with the Google behemoth over the past decade. None have had any real effect. Likewise, Google has had umpteen attempts at rolling out profitable software to compete with Microsoft’s desktop dominance or Sun’s & HP’s mainframe business. The only success is their own system of networked mini-computers using open-source software – so this doesn’t count!
Current Statistics
Below you’ll see the statistics globally, and also, as they hit this website, http://strangelyperfect.tv This is for comparison.
Browsers 
- Firefox: 47.9%
- IE (6 to 8): 39.4%
- Chrome: 6.5%
- Opera: 2.1%
StrangelyPerfect.TV (logs for August 2009 so far)
- Firefox: 34.3%
- IE (6 to 8): 49.7%
- Chrome: 3.4%
- Opera: 1.8%
Search Engine Usage
- Google: 78.45%
- Yahoo!: 7.16%
- Bing: 3.17%
StrangelyPerfect.TV (logs for August 2009 so far)
- Google: 76.6%
- Yahoo!: 4.2%
- Bing: 15.4%
Conclusion
What’s clear is that the visitors to this website StrangelyPerfect.tv, have clearly different preferences to the global norm. In fact (much to my chagrin it has to be said), there’s a clear tilt towards Microsoft products compared to global usage ratios.
Search
 What I do know is that the Bing results following search queries that finish at this website are on a par with the Google ones!
From my analysis of my (admittedly small) sample of website hits, I can categorically say that’s there’s now no difference between Google & Bing for general searching. I’ve proved this to myself with a few searches to corroborate this.
In this respect, Microsoft have done very well. How they’ve done this, I don’t know. But the similarities suggest similar logic at work on similar datasets. Whether industrial espionage is the reason or the more likely cause of parallel evolution, only time will tell.
Browser
Microsoft’s browser has come on leaps and bounds since development stopped at IE5/6 after they’d crushed Netscape out of existence (why develop new software when there is no competition?). Firefox has been the catalyst. It’s security, stability and user-friendly features have pushed it’s share right up. This forced Microsoft to react; first with the dreadfully slow IE7 and later with the much better IE8.
The in-built hysteresis of their desktop user base ensures that IE will be hard to beat. For myself, Firefox is still streets ahead, primarily because of it’s interface – the key features are sized and placed proportionately to their importance on the screen.
 It’s just, right; that’s all.
My gut feeling is that we’ve reached a balance point now that will remain for a couple of years at least. Because the vast bulk of computer users are only just computer literate and ignorant of any alternatives, I can’t see any browser pushing past the Microsoft desktop domination to enable the displacement of IE from the 50-50 mark.
Postscript
Weirdly, these are two battles of free against free. Browsers are free to use – as is internet search. It’s all about competing for advertising revenue in the end.
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Posted on 23:59, May 26th, 2009 by Strangely
The Intense Debate Install Story
 Along with some theme and plugins changes I’ve recently done, I’ve also had a play with Intense Debate (ID), a system complete with WordPress plugin for managing comments.
Phase One
Last week using my old theme I couldn’t get anywhere with the comment import. It kept crashing out at 9% done. Support were very helpful and gave me a link for a settings cleaner plugin.
I tried all manner of permutations (after doing the defaults three times) to get it to work. But it wouldn’t work so I removed the whole shebbang…
Phase Two
 You’d think that’d be the end of it…. Not Half! It’s Reesy you’re dealing with here, you know. I hunted around for different themes and decided that Atahualpa 3.3.2 looked like a good option.
 Northumberland Coat of Arms Well it works! The sickly sweet colour scheme is my invention. Coupled with a few Gibbets and Flying Fucks in the text, it’s my sort of contrast! It’s actually Vladamir Prelovac‘s fault. His homepage changed last month to a bizarre minimalism, completely at odds with his previous theme and the ones he’s designed, that it got me thinking that over-the-top (OTT) is okay! In fact, I’ve even morphed the Northumberland (or Provence, if you prefer) Flag into my Gravatar!
I particularly like the way the comments thread out now.
FYI: Atahualpa has over 200 customisations in it. Nearly all clever CSS work is removed for you – just follow the instructions for each area as you go along, check it in a browser (or three – I check in Firefox, Opera and IE8), and away you go.
Anyway, after fiddling with the theme and twiddling loads of header images etc, I thought I’d give Intense Debate (ID) a go again – and it worked! All comments loaded as per defaults and the interface is pretty neat, actually. However, problems started to arise….
- First, the supplied widget code wouldn’t show recent comments, only those from years ago, which is no good!
- Second, the Gravatar loading was skanky.
- Third, it removed the functionality of Tan Tan Noodles spam filter. This was actually a big deal. I don’t use all the functionality of the tool, but I think the regex pattern filter does a hellova goood job. In usage, it traps the same as Akismet, nearly!!!
- Fourth, I instantly got four spam comments! There’s the proof!
- Fifth, and finally – this morning the thing has been slowing the website down dreadfully.
- Sixth, and probably not finally, as I got the fifth one wrong, in an effort to keep some of the ID functionality (which is good, it must be said), I’ve played with the ID settings.
- Seventh, I’ve turned off the website ID interface which restores the neat comments sytem in the theme – RESULT! Instant speed boost!
Phase Three
So that’s where I am now. Further twiddling will have to wait as I go under the knife tomorrow…
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Posted on 07:10, May 22nd, 2009 by Strangely
I’ve Been Pinged from My Own Unknown Sub-Domains!
One day I’ll figure how this http protocol and the rest work….
Last night I had some hits looking for a feed and the domain root from http://forum.strangelyperfect.tv/board/
Now this doesn’t exist! So I got pinged by myself from something that doesn’t exist!
In fact I haven’t any sub-domains on this domain and there are no /board/ folders…. So I thought I’d check the records. After all, the records show that I’m referring to myself!!!
Well they say the referral was instigated by a person that’s already commented much good stuff to this website, @Not Kevin. He was at his standard ISP address in bonny Scotland.
What’s it Mean?
Well I don’t know, actually! It could be that Not Kevin was using a reader or plugin for Firefox that has certain default settings that it scans through. He could actually be on the World’s Most Wanted List of Hackers and Crackers, but I doubt it! All I know is that it’s weird.
What Else is Weird?
Well weird is weird. It’s another word that breaks the “I before E except after C” rule. More like a guideline really – like MP expenses and the Pirate Code.
Now that’s weird.
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Posted on 17:16, May 16th, 2009 by Strangely
PHPEnkoder is a port of the excellent Hivelogic Enkoder to PHP and, more specifically, to WordPress. It is used to display text in a way that users can see and bots can’t.
The encoding system is directly and unabashedly stolen from the BSD-licensed source of Hivelogic Enkoder, which works by randomly encoding a piece of text and sending to the browser self-evaluating Javascript that will generate the original text. This works in two ways: first, a bot must first have a fairly complete Javascript implementation; second, the decoding process can be made arbitrarily computationally intensive. This is similar to the idea of charging computational payments to send e-mail, only this is actually implemented.
email address could be here. The plugin obfuscates it with JavaScript. It works well and as designed, hiding the email address in the page source code but showing it to JavaScript enabled browsers. So I’m leaving it in for now to protect the odd person who floats their email address into comments….
I’ve taken my spammer’s email honeypot address away.
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Posted on 07:52, May 14th, 2009 by Strangely
It’s happened again!
Actually, it’s happened several times but this is the first post on it…
While looking at my stats logs for this website, strangelyperfect.tv, I’ve had some incongruous hits from US universities, some of whom should have better I.T. departments, IMHO.
Example One
Here are four from yesterday – I had two hits from each address.
- http://dhibwiki.buffalo.edu/index.php/Buy_Levitra_Online_Order_ Levitra_Online_Purchase_Levitra_Online_Cheap
- http://dhibwiki.buffalo.edu/index.php/Buy_Viagra_Online_Order_ Viagra_Online_Purchase_Viagra_Online_Cheap
- http://dhibwiki.buffalo.edu/index.php/Buy_Cialis_Soft_Tabs_Online_Order_Cialis_ Soft_Tabs_Online_Purchase_Cialis_Soft_Tabs_Online_Cheap
- http://dhibwiki.buffalo.edu/index.php/Buy_Cialis_Online_Order_Cialis_Online_ Purchase_Cialis_Online_Cheap
You get the drift? The main index folder is left open and someone has written to the space with four crap spam things. The main index page is normal with an intro to the ‘Digital Humanities’ dept of the yooni. Most of the 4 dodgy pages have been accessed >600 times. Being a Wiki, you can check the history… … …
It was put there yesterday and the referring URL is
Example Two
- http://www.umbc.edu/ddm/wiki/Buy_Cialis_Online_Order_Cialis_Online_Purchase_Cialis_Online_Cheap – this morning!!
This is called the Distributed and Ubiquitous Data Mining (DDM) encyclopedia that anyone can edit from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC)…. I call it referral spam!
Example Three
- http://www.stanford.edu/group/htgg/cgi-bin/mediawiki/index.php?title=Levitra_professional_overnight_delivery - you read it right!
Yes. Stanford University. A list of their alumni is here, but suffice to say that most of the modern IT & communications world is derived from Stanford folk…
The Problem
The problem for me, not being an IT genius, is how these sites find and then ping my website? What do they hope to achieve?
Another issue is the ease with which these websites are cracked using this Wiki software and the apparent ease with which extra processes can run, even in a knowledgeable place like Stanford.
All the above links were working as of early A.M., 14 May 2009. I haven’t added actual hyperlinks, but a copy & paste will do it for you if you wish to check.
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