http://www.freedomkeys.com/vigil.htm

"As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism -- unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell

"Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over." -- John Stossel

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

Thinking out of the box, and greater experience always helps to finding short-cuts to getting that work done. In this case, the GBM team gives us tips on how to make it easier to access those Inking tools in the Microsoft Office suite.

The following is a re-post from an earlier article we published on customizing the Quick Access Toolbar so that the pen is easier to access in Office 2007:

One of the frustrating things about Office 2007 is how the inking tools are hidden under the Review Ribbon button. The ink options are harder to find, further sending the message that ink is a second-class citizen in Office products, and breaks that flow of “thinking in ink”. When I want to ink, I don’t want to hunt and peck for my pens. I just want to start inking.

…

Now you have one-click access to your pens and they are no longer hidden under the obscure “Review” tab. Unfortunately, the Editor Options do not apply system wide in Outlook. You’ll need to make the same changes to the Calendar, Contact, and Journal screens. Just create a new item for Calendar, Contact, and Journal, and then go to the Editor Options for each type to customize the Quick Access Toolbar. Follow the same instructions for customizing Word, Excel, etc.

GBM How To: Add Pen Options to Quick Access Toolbar
Rob Bushway
Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Now, all I need is a shortcut to keeping the battery in my mobile phone charged. (? whatever ?)

Isn’t it sweet that the Australian Government would like everyone to realise that we hold the moral high ground.

Time to end Bush’s wretched war. (excerpt)

Yesterday, the Australian Government, via the Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, reiterated its opposition to the death penalty. "We urge countries who continue to apply capital punishment not to do so," he told the ABC, adding that Australia would co-sponsor a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly calling for a moratorium on capital punishment.

Just as we hold the moral high ground on all those other International Treatise signed on the rights of children, or the rights of asylum seekers, after which we close the doors from any critics and go ahead and literally drive people to self-harm, suicide, mental illness.

But we are white, and white is might, so it must be right.

The Pacific Solution.

Feb 2008: As promised prior to the 2007 Federal Election, the ALP on assuming government, quickly moved to shut down the Australian-run detention centre on Nauru in the remote South Pacific. However, it has not withdrawn the controversial September 2001 legislation that created the offshore detention and processing system that came to be known as the 'Pacific Solution'. Instead of transferring asylum seekers en route to Australia to Nauru, it now transfers all asylum seekers to the detention centre on Christmas Island off Australia's far North-West coast. They still have have no rights under Australian law and are processed separately.

Oh, and they didn’t get the chance to enact a new legislation with greater powers similar to what allows the above ‘solution’ because those fool citizens didn’t give the ALP a majority in the Senate.

Commenting on the announcement, James Thomson, spokesperson for the National Council of Churches’ refugee program, which coordinated the statement, said that if it were not for the sustained pressure that churches and community brought to bear in the debate, and the pivitol role played by key parliamentarians who stood their ground against the Bill, it would have been passed.

Flight from Nauru ends Pacific Solution

"The Pacific solution was a cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise introduced on the eve of a federal election (in 2001) by the Howard government," Senator Evans said.

He said the department had spent $289 million between September 2001 and June 2007 to run the Nauru and Manus centres.

Mark Getchell, from the International Organisation for Migration, which ran the Nauru facility, said there were now no asylum seekers left on Nauru.

"It is the end of an era," Mr Getchell said.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) welcomed the end of the policy.

"Many bona fide refugees caught by the policy spent long periods of isolation, mental hardship and uncertainty - and prolonged separation from their families," UNHCR's Richard Towle said in a statement

A number of interesting announcements from Microsoft recently that seems to allude at the giant more explicitly returning to one of its earlier principles, ‘everyone gets a piece of the pie’ and by extension with have more pieces of the pie form which to monetise.

When MS was an application company, they had an interpreter that would run their applications on the target platform. So msword.com was actually the ‘loader’ for the interpreter and the subsequent code. One of the rationales was protection of the code from being decompiled, the other to minimise the code development. If there’s a new platform, just update the interpreter for the target OS/hardware. MS word was released for DOS and Xenix? using this interpreter?

I remember when COBOL support was in Windows 3.1 ? There were sample codes around that apparently worked for someone, but it never worked for me. And I remember trying to get some peoples Microsoft Pascal code to work with the GUI in OS/2? Don’t even think about what MS was trying to do with Fortran (geezz GUI programming in Fortran, let it die!!!)

Microsoft tried doing single source code for Excel between Windows and Mac OS, there was the attempt to get the Ruby/Access/VB Engine multiplatform between Windows/Mac OS. There was the Visual Studio cross platform development between Windows/Mac OS.

The Agnostic nature of the company has been more explicit recently with the Silverlight directions (i.e. it runs on Windows, MAC OS, Linux through mono, FreeBSD through …) and to some degree with the Dot NET framework.

When Live Space allowed external desktop blogging tools to update data on its service (i.e. so you can blog etc.) they used an adaptation of an existing ‘standard.’ But soon after Microsoft released another tool Windows Writer –> Windows Live Writer that not only allowed you to post to Microsoft sites and a few major sites but quickly grew to adopting most formats out there.

More importantly, the extensibility of Windows Live Writer meant that it soon had the capability to post and extract multimedia from a number of different services including flickr, youtube, msn soapbox.

Move forward into late 2008 and the embracing all, has thankfully extended to a number of tools.

Windows Live Photo Gallery now lets you push photos to Flickr, Picasa, smugmug, Facebook. There goes my interest in Picasa, which was really about it’s better integration with the online version than Photo Gallery.

Azureus to be supporting COBOL.

Microsoft has already shown it believes a new range of ‘developers’ exist with her Expression series of developer tools. The content developer has long ago extended, on the web, to the prolific web users. Making it easier for these users to create their content for the web (through their personal web sites, blogs) increases the use of your tools and platforms.

Now, the dilemma remains on how is this thing to be monetised?

My dad watched the Fiji –vs- Australia Semi Final game, and enjoyed himself.

The Rugby League World Cup is more Amco Cup than World Cup.

Tonight we were supposed to watch and enjoy a delayed broadcast of a semi final of the RLWC.

Read More… 

The Rugby League World Cup is a joke
LeftArmSpinner
Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:24:25 GMT

I personally found it hard to comprehend what was the whole point of pitting a side of $100K professionals against part-time workers?

Oh yeah, the entertainment value of listening to those wonderful comments from broadcasters who begin the show by saying how much the Australian side have to be wary of the flamboyance to later turn around saying that “this is going to hurt.”

Oh yeah, and it really advances Rugby League in those minnow countries ? No. The last time Rugby League grew in Tonga was when the ARL and SuperLeague were throwing money around. How long ago was that ?

But if the US can have World Championships for sports only they play, who says we can’t hold similar moments of delirium.

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

After church on Sunday we stopped over Uncle John’s house because we haven’t totally destroyed someone else’s house in a long time.

Now, we feel better so it’s time to go home.

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.