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

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.

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.

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.

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

My editor of choice is Scite and there's been an enhancement with one of the 'packages' I use that just drives me crazy. Autocompletion of quotes and brackets. This feature autocompletes your quotes, such that everytime your enter a single or double quote " the editor will automatically put in the second ". Feature drives me crazy.

I get a phone call this morning from the ‘Eua clan pointing me to a new project their involved in.

http://peanutsfunnyfarm.blogspot.com

Peanut’s Funny Farm is an activity farm for underprivileged children aged up to 18 years. We have designed Peanut’s Funny Farm specifically to be a safe and happy environment for children and Animals. The children are welcome to come and stay at the farm where they can play with and care for animals, ride horses and take part in a number of different outdoor activities. Our goal is to help children spend some quality time with animals that do not judge them or cause harm to them, but will love them for who they are. We also give refuge and shelter to as many unwanted animals as possible.

Trust the ‘Eua mob to come all the way in from the Islands, to find happiness on a farm.

They’re out there with their palangi-loi mum helping out with setting up the facilities etc. If you think you can be part of the fun, or someone you may know may find it useful, head on over and take at look.

And a beautiful day in Sydney it is for being out doors.

What is Clonezilla

You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package

Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Some people still don’t think they need a disk image backup solution, and they may not.

But if you have to maintain a network of computers (whether for a school, work, or social club) today’s increased capacity in disk drives (and their relatively lower prices) demands you consider this as a solution for making your maintenance life easier.

Computers can be configured to ‘wake-up’ to certain peripheral device activities, something (as I recall) pioneered in the PC Space by Apple’s Nubus back in the ‘dark ages?’ The idea is that we can conserve electricity by putting our computers to ‘sleep’ and have some event (such as someone wanting to talk with the computer) wake up the computer.

Today, ‘wake-up’ is a common feature offered on computers.

Apart from the security implications of a computer activating (or being owned) when you plug in a Firewire / IEE1394 device (such as some external drives and Digitial Video Cameras) there’s a nice feature in Windows Vista that would ‘wake-up’ my laptop when I move my external/usb mouse.

Wake-up on USB is a nice feature, that you love half the time, and hate the other half.

Put the laptop into sleep, or just let the screen saver do it and go away from your desk for a cup of coffee or something. It is seriously convenient to just get to back, bump the mouse and be back online browsing the web (oops, working!!!.)

On the other hand, it is hugely inconvenient to put the laptop to sleep, shutdown the screen and then have someone else bump the mouse for the laptop to be active while the screen is down (i.e. no clear indicator for me that my battery is draining away.) It doesn’t help that it seems that since I have my laptop authenticate after waking up, it doesn’t go back to sleep so my battery can be totally drained with the lid down.

Don’t even go into the problem that many people have, where something wakes Windows/Laptop up while it’s in your bag giving the laptop a good chance to drain the battery and heat it self up silly.

As a given, if you put your Windows box into sleep mode, and you don’t want it to wake-up because you’re putting the laptop into your bag, pull all the USB devices out before Windows gets into ‘sleep’ nirvana.

The lessons.

Decide on the level of inconvenience your prefer. Until Windows is intelligent enough to figure out that Monday ~ Friday between 5:00 and 6:00pm when I put the thing to sleep, I don’t want it to wake up until I open the lid, live with it. Actually, if Windows and this laptop can just figure out I don’t ever want the laptop to wake-up while the lid is down, that would be a huge success.

Like, how often do you hear of people on battery power turning on their laptops while the screen is shut. they must be in a different world over at Redmond?

For battery life, get another power-brick for your laptop (unfortunately I’m over-geeked and carry two laptops with one power-brick between them.) Come to me sayeth Windows, for I will make your yoke heavy.

Of all the naysayers, fanboys out there for Google’s new engine.

Has anyone noticed the contribution Google is doing by BSD licensing the product?

Just as OpenBSD ‘saved’ the world by contributing OpenSSH as a BSD licensed product (so everyone and their dog can use the best SSH server/client without reprisals or arguments) is Google trying to push Chrome’s Javascript Engine V8 to become a new standard that everyone can use ?

If V8 is faster, more compliant then any other pseudo javascript engine out there, then why would you not incorporate it into your browser? Especially if it gives your end-users (browsers and developers) a better experience.

Go Google, Go IE9

Avoided it for a couple of hours, but after looking it up it wasn’t that hard after all.

Summary:

I needed to connect to a client’s broadband modem to do some maintenance. Unfortunately we’ve set the client up such that administrating the modem is only possible ‘from inside’ the client’s side of the cable modem.

The 2nd problem is that the modem is administered through a web interface so the question is, how can I securely get Internet Explorer to connect through a machine on the inside back to this modem ?

In fact, only one machine on the network can access the modem.

I was side-tracked with another problem using tunnels, but the solution for this particular scenario was relatively simple.

 

ssh –L local-port:modem-ip:modem-port internal-host

local-port is the port on my local machine that I will point the browser to (for example: http://localhost:local-port)

modem-ip is the IP address for the modem, from the internal-host. For example, a non-routeable/private IP address such as 172.16.11.1.

modem-port. The port on the modem where the web interface is listening. For example 80 or 443

internal-host is the Host inside the network to which I can jump to from the outside (usually a machine with a public-ip)

ssh –L 4321:172.16.11.1:80 host.example.org

I can access the modem by starting up Internet Explorer and using the address http://localhost:4321

ssh –L 4322:172.16.11.1:443 host.example.org

I can now access the SSL secured interface by using the address https://localhost:4322

Using the above scenario you can supposedly daisy-chain (connect from one server to the next) by having multiple terminals making one link to the next.

There’s also some ssh fu where you can chain from one machine to the next to the next on a single command-line, but we’ll leave that for another day.