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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.