OK, so the reason we’re talking about AVG Antivirus is because we’re back in the Windows Desktop support role and have to look at what’s currently out there for gratis for some of my cheapo friends.

Unfortunately, you’re medicine is only as good as you make sure to keep them up to date (all things go stale when you leave them alone for too long.)

• Antivirus – AVG
• Firewall – Microsoft
• Spyware – SpybotSD, and SpywareBlaster
• Internet Browsing – Internet Explorer 7.0x and Firefox 3.0.x (‘cause I still visit sites that are broken in FF, FF 3.1beta, IE 8 beta, Chrome, Opera etc.)
• Email Client – Mozilla Thunderbird

If you value your time, then just go ahead and pay for a quality product that has the automated update services (and pray that the updates don’t break your machine.)

Diagnostics ?

• Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows – just download and configure it and it will configure most of the tools you’ll ever need for diagnosing/fixing a Windows Box problem.

Read the screens for the install, you can upgrade or the virus signatures et. al during the configuration (so you don’t need to do it with every launch of the tool.)

You can create a USB Memory Stick ‘install’ which allows you to launch most tools on a ‘running’ Windows XP box without having to boot from the CDR or USB Stick.

Now, back to installing these things.

I get enough people asking and my current antivirus of choice is the AVG Suite (and we went for the family pack) but the free edition is over at:

http://www.avg.com/product-avg-anti-virus-free-edition

The 3^rd Annual “Battle of the Bands” is a music festival of ethnic youth and young people within Victoria. The night will include ethnic action dancing, sway of the pacific, the glitter of Asia, Bands from the church groups will range from heavy rock to gospel country.

Many of the stars of the music festival will be “Second Generation” Australian born children of immigrants and refugees as performers.

Everyone is welcome to come and join in the fun and audience members are encouraged to come in costume of your ethnic heritage which include Anglo, European background.(Dutch, German, Scottish, English, Wales, etc)

It is proudly supported by the Uniting Church in Australia.

Date 22 November 2008.

Location Box Hill Wesley Uniting Church in 2-6 Oxford Street, Box Hill, Melbourne.

Times 3pm to 9.30pm

parking details Street parking

Tickets secretary. Tee Makoni - talaheumakoni@hotmail.com

Adults $5.00

Young people 12 to 25 Goldcoin donation

Children under 12 free.

Food stalls will be available

New Performers wishing to join in should contact:

Don Ikitoelagi (03) 9251- 5287 email Don.Ikitoelagi@victas.uca.org.au

Do yourself a favour and get used to using this tool before you install your next favourite ‘tiny’ app from the Internet.

Just type "perfmon" in the Vista search box to run the Reliability and Performance Monitor and then select Network.  The resulting pane will reflect all running programs that are actively talking to the Web.  This will give you a heads up if there are programs there you don't think should be talking to the WWW.

Are your programs tapping the Internet? Here's how to find out
James Kendrick
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:47:57 GMT

When your system begins to slow down like crazy, give the above app a run and see if it helps identify the culprits.

One of the wonderful things about Open Source software is that there is a continuum of upgrades where users and developers find things that are broken and fix them.

Unfortunately, some of the fixes cause more breaks than existed in the system.

Gallery 2.1 upgrade to 2.3svn failings

Posted by: Samiuela LV Taufa on January 11, 2008 2:56:59 PM (821 Reads)

The regular problems taking for ever and a day to resolve happened again when I tried upgrading (due to security warnings) to a more current version of Gallery2.

Unfortunately, the upgrade coincided with Tonfon deciding to give me a hard time with Internet connections.

Clear problems from the upgrade.

it’s a good thing I’ve wandered this space often enough that my own records are augmenting poor memory, such that I can fix the new problem with the old fix.

Upgraded my Gallery to the current release as there were a number of documented security reasons to upgrade. Unfortunately, the update broke my Gallery and I haven’t been able to dedicate the time to fixing it, until I decided to google nomoa.com!!! Way to go nomoa.com.

Leave it to Dare Obasanjo to finally make a decent summary of what is the Windows Haze.

Disclaimer: What follows are my personal impressions from using the beta version of Windows Azure. It is not meant to be an official description of the project from Microsoft, you can find that here.

…

What is it?

Before talking about a cloud computing platform, it is useful to agree on definitions of the term cloud computing. Tim O'Reilly has an excellent post entitled Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing where he breaks the technologies typically described as cloud computing into three broad categories

…

To try out Azure you need to be running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista with a bunch of prerequisites you can get from running the Microsoft Web Platform installer.

…

…, I find the Live Services piece (access to user data in a uniform way) and the SQL Services (hosted storage) most interesting. I will likely revisit them in more depth at a later date.

…

It would be interesting to read [or write] further thoughts on the pros and cons of Platform as a Service offerings when compared to Utility Computing offerings. … it would be informative to look at the topic from more angles…

Windows Azure from a Developer's Perspective
Dare Obasanjo
Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:04:04 GMT

Sometimes Microsoft can be at fault for not even understanding their own message, and then there are the times when even the fanboys and detractors just don’t have a clue.

The Free Press failed democracy in Australia when it kept silent and did not dig into the Howard Government exploitation of asylum seekers for political (let alone all the other nasties of that situation to maintain the facade), and it again looks to be failing Democracy. This time the failing is in the US Presidential elections where for some reason the ‘free press’ is conveniently forgetting the atrocities of this financial melt down brought forth by one candidate’s party politics.

Orson Scott Card, a noted author et. al. pulls the details in his treatise …

I  remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism.  You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere.  It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan?  It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

Seems similar to the existing two party system in Australia. One side has great economic nuance and atrocious concept of humanity, while the other side is all hugs and kisses and kiss economic stability goodbye.

There’s little worst in life than to live a lie and to be ignorant of it. It seems the ‘Free Press’ really isn’t that ‘free.’

From: Orson Scott Card, I love you.

It’s 2008. Every other month I go over my Internet bandwidth limit at home because Ubuntu needs an update, …, and the update just wants to bring home the neighbours kitchen sink.

The update process in Ubuntu has …. well it has gotten out of control. There is no doubt that updates are a necessity for security patches and bug fixes…no argument there. However, Ubuntu seems to want to build the operating system as they go… having you download huge numbers of updates, often daily.

read more

Ubuntu…Please Don’t Release on Time!
mogyweb
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:50:28 GMT

But that is the life of a wannabe techo, bleeding edge bleeding pocket book.

If you want to really screw up things … you really have to be part of the largest institutes, and in most cases they happen to be national or multinational, including straight national states.

From the UK Telegraph.

The Department for Work and Pensions last year admitted that seven in 10 government IT projects fail.

So it is hardly surprising that progress on the NHS’s “Connecting for Health” computerisation scheme, already running at least four years late, has almost ground to a halt.

What is particularly concerning about this case, however, is its sheer cost - £12 billion.

All well to glorify the doom scenarios, but what can we do to find a solution? There’s a short ‘prescription’ in the above article. But, as it also ascribes things on paper don’t always become effective implementations.

As the most dangerous part of a car is the nut loose behind the wheel so is IT deployment. Fix the ‘nut’ and you’re more than half-way to your solution.

A change of pace with the train ride last night (Tuesday.) Monday nights ride was on an old clunker with a certified Buddhist Nun (a name we give her because we couldn’t be bothered to use the foreign tongue accurate title.)

Tuesday night’s ride was on a freezer car, which leads me to believe that CityRail has an advanced system for cooling/heating the railcars where extreme effort and technology have been expanded to ensure that the system as a whole is at  the perfect human habitable temperature.

This means, that the State Raile service detects when the train to Woy Woy’s air conditioning system starts going on the blink and the carriages are heating up. To ensure an equitable distribution, the system automatically finds another train that can compesate, so the train to Penrith is adjusted to ensure the increase in cooling directly meats the increasing in temperature for Woy Woy.

Advanced technology doesn’t replace advanced intelligence, or just some intelligence.

Back to my ride.

This old guy gets on the train and asks me if I’m Arabic, which is a first. i’ve been questioned whether I’m Hispanic and other stuff, but not Arabic.

We finally make it to Bankstown station and there’s the mad scramble up the stairs for the sheep to be pushed through those pedestrian ticketing aisles. The old wanders through like everyone else but then squeezes in close behind the person going through the gate.

Woooop.

He successfully gets through without a ticket, because the gate doesn’t close while it still thinks that a fat person with a huge elongated butt is still squeezing through the gate.

Woo hoo, way to go old guy. Riding the rails at will.

Dude, if old guys can do this kind of stuff, there’s still hope for us to find bugs in our systems and security holes. And, I guess it’s never too old to learn some new tricks, or get up the gumption to see things through.

Shell Programming and Scripting

There’s always Google and Live Search, but the Shell Programming and Scripting forums look just like the place to wander around to learn more about that scripting environment called unix shell.

Looking back at a present past

Stuart was there at the onset of the consumer focussed Internet and brings us an interesting perspective of how the toolsets we now use evolved.

It was 10 years ago today that I first got involved with the Mozilla project.

As I once said: “I did, like, some random, like, little basic things.“

In the beginning…

It all started sometime in 1995 when I started running Linux.  Sometime over the next couple of years I decided to write a GUI email client.  Ironically, the only real option at the time was Netscape Communicator.  GTK+ and GNOME were both new and I decided to go with them as my toolkit of choice.  Eventually I ended up with the Balsa email client.  Through my journey with the Linux desktop I had gotten to know a number of people, including one Mike Shaver who at the time was at Netscape.

Stuart Parmenter: Ten Years
Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:26:15 GMT

People easily forget that ‘today’ started off quite a long time ago and with quite a bit of sweat for some people.

Wow, there’s a lot of advocates out there.

From the official announcement on Monday 13th October at 09:00 UTC, to midnight on Sunday 20th October, OpenOffice.org 3.0 recorded an astonishing three million downloads via the Bouncer.

OpenOffice.org 3.0: 3,009,832 downloads in one week
brunomiguel
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:19:51 GMT

Not too shabby for what amounts to be a huge download. I’ve got it installed on my Vista box (together with my legal Office 2007 install) and I guess there’s an Ubuntu (read Debian) version of the download I should install.

At the moment my greatest need for an Office suite on my Ubuntu box is to do some charting of a few figures I’m collecting/munging on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the OO Spreadsheet’s charting facilities isn’t doing it for me. MS Excel’s chart’s are really nice and easy to put together but the data comes off the Ubuntu box.

What am I to do? Yeah, yeah, I could of course get my brain into motion again and write something … now if only I could have a dual monitor setup while on the train … but then again I’d probably use it for gaming.

We all ‘know’ that a lot of what is purported out there as ‘for your safety’ but it is ugly when government spends billions of dollars on securing airports to be circumvented by just using your printer at home.

I just love this story!
Not at all certain I would dare to try it myself. Reading how Schneier uses fake boarding passes, and brings 24oz of not identified liquid through the airport security is like reading a Ken Follet novel!
And you all know what I think of airport security!

Schneier demonstrates poor airport security to The Atlantic
Kai
Sat, 18 Oct 2008 05:35:54 GMT

Apparently the smoke and mirrors have been determined to fool most of the people, most of the time. And the rest of you just keep quiet, shhhhhh

I was given this new book to read “Human Rights Overboard” it is a strange book to go through as it is part depressing, part encouraging, but wholly puts you into a zone of disbelief.

Unfortunately, for a title that could be ground-breaking expose (researched none-the-less) I walked into Dymocks (one of the major booksellers here) and the only way the Australian public are going to know about this work is if they already knew. (i.e. you have to special order.)

Human Rights Overboard BRISKMAN & GODDARD
Draws together, for the first time, the oral testimony and written submissions from the inquiry in a powerful and vital book that stands as an indelible record of one of Australia's bleakest legacies.

• ISBN

  9781921372407

• Format

  Paperback

• Category

• Publisher

• Imprint

• Pages

Online Price: $32.95

Add To Basket

Usually Ships in:
24 Hours

Fortunately, it seems that if you really do know about the book, then you can order it online (and get it faster than the guy walking into the shop.)

Should be required reading for all Tongans (in Tonga) dealing directly with Australian Government representatives. Should be required reading for senior church staff in Australia (of all denominations.)

I’ve been doing this for a while now, and kept thinking there’s got to be a better way!!

Scenario:

I have one or two files that I need to copy from my laptop to 5 or so machines across the network and sometimes through the internet.

The transport(?) of choice is ssh’s secure copy ‘scp’ which lead to typing and waiting something like this.

scp file host1:/home/samt
scp file host2:/home/samt
scp file host3:/home/samt
scp file host4:/home/samt
scp file host5:/home/samt

Do you see a pattern there ? Yeah, everything gets repeated X number of times except for the host name. Once I decided to get my brain out of maintenance mode and into thinking a little bit it wasn’t that difficult to find that the answer is something as simple as.

for i in host1 host2 host3 host4 host5; do echo –n ${i}; scp ${i}:/home/samt; done

and more importantly I don’t have to wait, a side benefit is that now I don’t have to type in .nullcube.com .nullcube.com 5 times since I can fix that with ….

for i in host1 host2 host3 host4 host5;
do echo –n ${i};
scp ${i}.nullcube.com:/home/samt;
done

I’m not sure if I’ve saved anything on the typing, but at least I could get the mind numbing effect of typing the domain names put to rest.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to return my brain into maintenance mode. pzzzzt.

It’s amazing the simple things in life that can get people’s nickers in a knot.

After the web learned earlier this week that the final name of Vista's successor was Windows 7, all hell broke loose. The general consensus was that Windows 7 wasn't a bad name, but the reasoning behind it wasn't very clear. Many couldn't figure out how Microsoft had reached the number 7 (I'll give you a hint: they were looking at the kernel version number, instead of counting every single minor and major Windows release). But then others wanted to know why the current builds of Windows 7 were at kernel version 6.1, not 7.0.
Mike Nash, Corporate VP of Windows Product Management, chimed in again on the Windows Vista Team Blog with the official explanation:
"So we decided to ship the Windows 7 code as Windows 6.1 - which is what you will see in the actual version of the product in cmd.exe or computer properties. There's been some fodder about whether using 6.1 in the code is an indicator of the relevance of Windows 7. It is not. Windows 7 is a significant and evolutionary advancement of the client operating system. It is in every way a major effort in design, engineering, and innovation. The only thing to read into the code versioning is that we are absolutely committed to making sure application compatibility is optimized for our customers."
Read full story...

Final release of Windows 7 to have kernel version 6.1
Sicarius
Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:31:37 GMT

The more amazing news is that there is still so much code out there in the world with seriously broken code like.

if ( major_version != X ) then
   exit

When was it were were told to write code that allowed you to write

if ( os.major_version < X ) then
   exit
if ( os.major_version > X ) then
  potential_compatability_warning

Maybe MS should ship with their SDK’s a switch to increment the os version during the debug sessions?

Office 2007, Windows Vista.

Start Microsoft Access 2007 and windows complains with a dialogue box that says

“Can’t find Language DLL msain900.dll”

Do the search engine dance to find mostly useless questions, without answers, and find more than a few people willing to give you a free download of ‘that missing file.’

Also Known As: The easiest way to get spyware or a virus is to let the user get it themselves.

Thanks to kpgraham at PCReview forums, the answer is relatively forward.

Re-install

or, at least go back to your Office installation program and install all the bits and pieces for Microsoft Access. It has been a long time since Office was installed on this machine and apparently Access wasn’t completely installed even though I had these lovely icons.

The solution:

a. Open up Control Panel,

b. Open Add/Remove Programs (for Windows XP) Programs and Features (for Windows Vista).

c. Select Microsoft Office installation, and click Change

d. Select Add or Remove Features

Enable installation of all of Microsoft Access’ features

I’ve been tracking OpenOffice (using it exclusively on-and-off) and they are really progressing quickly through their RC (Release Candidates)

The wonderful thing about their recent announcement?

The first office suite to use the new OASIS OpenDocument format, the future-proof international standard for office software

So now all those Paranoid types can get the ‘standards’ compliant Office Productivity tool for which IBM and Sun have been pushing to save your soul from Microsoft.

Read: There’s been a lot of hoopla huffing and puffing over a ‘standard’ that only now exists?

Not even in Tonga.

From: OpenOffice 3.0 RC4 

OpenOffice.org is an open-source, multiplatform and multilingual office suite comparable with MS Office.
It is compatible with all other major office suites and is free to download, use, and distribute. It was previously known as StarOffice before it became an open-source project. OpenOffice comes with OpenWriter - a word processor, OpenCalc - a spreadsheet and OpenImpress - a presentational package.
* The first office suite to use the new OASIS OpenDocument format, the future-proof international standard for office software
* Easy to install, with a whole new look and feel, matched to the type of computer in use
* More intuitive, more easy to use than ever, with a host of new usability features
* Complete with Base: an easy-to-use database manager with a fully integrated database
* Compatible with other software packages - now understands even obscure and rarely used features in major competitors.
You may download OpenOffice.org completely free of any licence fees, use it for any purpose - private, educational, government and public administration, commercial - and pass on copies free of charge to family, friends, students, employees, etc.
News source: OpenOffice.org
Download: OpenOffice 3.0 RC3
View: Release notes
Read full story...

OpenOffice 3.0 RC4
Marcel Klum
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:53:33 GMT

We all knew nz’s?

THE Federal Opposition's new immigration spokeswoman has raised strong concerns about the Government's new seasonal worker program.

Sharman Stone, from regional Victoria, where many of the new visa-holders would work, said the program was confusing and lacked detail.

Regulations to allow 2500 Pacific Islanders into Australia as guest workers were introduced into Parliament on Tuesday.

Unease over seasonal jobs - National News - National - General - Central Western Daily