Repeat until Fade

Linked below is an article at Lifehacker, it gives a guide on how to ensure a Microsoft XP/W2K PC is kept in shape to perform well and also is protected from internet nasties. I have performed this type of operation what feels like a million times, now with this guide i can just point people to this Lifehacker article. Then wait for them to call me again to get me to do it no doubt :-)

Full URL : http://lifehacker.com/software/feature/geek-to-live--how-to-fix-mom-and-dads-computer-138113.php

OR Click HERE

F1 - remind me what that F stands for

Well didn't things work out well, the Mclaren team using the stolen secrets of the Italian giants, lose out in the final race, so the long deserving Finnish driver wins the championship.......If the China pit lane debacle from lewis had not taken place would you have not the slightest suspicion that Lewis had his car switched off from the pits?

But the 'fairy tale' ending of cheats not prospering and the injured party winning in the final race does seem too perfect, imagine the alternative result...

• Lewis or Fernando wins the drivers crown
• The championship is tainted forever by Nigel Stepney having morals lower than a sewer rat.
• The f1 viewing public lose faith, the viewing figures drop, no adverts, no telly coverage.
• Furthermore if Fernando would have won I think his behavior this year within his own team would have given the sport the wrong image and memory of the 2007 season

I think Kimi deserves a world championship, I think that Lewis eventually will win a championship, I think Fernando deserved his two so far but must look in the mirror about facing up to other drivers, Lewis put Alonso in a position this year that he handled badly, hence he should consider being not just a 3 time world champion in the future, but a GREAT 3 time champion, which needs more than just skill behind the wheel.

Again i can't think todays race was fixed by remote control pit intervention, entirely due to the events in China, but conspiracy theorists will have field day with this one....

Capri two litre

FTSE Prop Trader friend of mine who I was the misnomer of best man for, recently celebrated his wedding anniversary with his wife, here in Capri, Italy, at the Capri Palace Hotel:

http://www.capripalace.com

• He Paid £1000 per night for a sea view = Broom cupboard with a view of some rocks near the sea covered in albatross crap..
• Ordered drinks by the pool first day, one peroni and one pina colada = Paid the guy and then worked out that the beer was £18 and the Pina Colada £30
• Next morning at breakfast he is sat on the table adjacent to Michael Schumacher, a very tanned midget by all accounts, who is moaning to an American colleague that his room is too small and the drinks are very expensive……he is worth about £300 million after being F1 word champ 7 times - small clue….This is a very expensive Hotel
• The pool area is basically crowded with 60 year old men with micro briefs and near skin cancer tans laying on sunbeds with their 20 year old nubile mistresses who would be nearly drowned by their jewelery weight, apparently that’s the only good thing about the place (from my friends point of view).
• Thus a very beautiful island resort off the coast of Italy where you need a minimum income of £300 million to not feel like you are delboy from peckham.

Morale of the story? Stick to Capri in terms of classic fords not weekend breaks. See below

Capri 2 litre

Great article on Writing your own firefox extension

Great article on Writing your own firefox extension

http://www.businesslogs.com/technology/firefox_extension_tutorial.php

Horse Back Scorpio

Hmmmm.....not normally an astrological fan but i am a 'Scorpio' and was born in the Chinese year of 'the horse'.....for those that know me peronally....sound like me....? I am a little scared what may fly back here :-)

Year Of The Horse

1918, 1930, 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002

People born in the Year of the Horse are popular. They are cheerful, skillful with money, and perceptive, although they sometimes talk too much. The are wise, talented, good with their hands, and sometimes have a weakness for members of the opposite sex. They are impatient and hot-blooded about everything except their daily work. They like entertainment and large crowds. They are very independent and rarely listen to advice. They are most compatible with those born in the years Tiger, Dog, and Sheep.

Scorpio

Scorpios are known for their intensity. They are determined folk that absolutely throw themselves into whatever they do -- but getting them to commit to something is rarely an easy task. In fact, it's better not to even try to "get them" to do anything. Solar Scorpios absolutely have their own mind. And, their primary motivation is unlikely to be prestige (like their Capricorn friends), or even authority (Leos can have that, too)--it's real power. Their power can absolutely be of the "behind the scenes" variety, just as long as they have it.

To others, Scorpios seem to have plenty of willpower. They probably do. Scorpios do know what they want, and they won't go out and grab it at the wrong moment. They simply sit back, watch (quite expertly), and then get it only when the moment is just right. This apparent patience is simply their powerful skills at strategy at work.

Scorpio isn't afraid of getting their hands (their bodies, their minds) dirty. The darker side of life intrigues them, and they're always ready to investigate.

Scorpios simply never give up. They have tremendous staying power. They're not in the slightest intimidated by anybody or anything. Confrontations are not a problem. In fact, talk to any Scorpio about their lives, and you'll probably be in awe at all they've gone through. Trauma seems to follow them wherever they go. When Scorpio learns optimism, instead of expecting the worst, they'll find that they possess amazing regenerative powers -- the power to heal, create, and transform.

Humax mac

After my recent lack of posts, mainly due to personal and professional workload, I thought I would drop some information into the BLOG. You may have seen my previous Humax posts regarding the Humax 9200T twin tuner PVR, digital signal reception and how i solved the issue. Well I have now found a way to utilise the Humax's USB port, as I wanted to start offloading recorded programs resident on the humax to a laptop computer.....

Problem One - My Laptop is a powerbook mac
Problem two - Other @home computers are Linux
Problem three - Humax support windows only (shock)
Where to start? : Google.....(where else)

Well there is an 'open source' saviour see here (http://www.andrewdsmith.plus.com/hummy/), Mr Smith has produced a great piece of software that allows Linux/OSX and Unix users to connect to the Humax and download the content. The software ran like a dream and worked 100%, well done Mr Smith I thank you for your outstanding efforts.

However I found that since the Humax has a USB 1.1 it takes about as long to transfer the movie to the MAC as to watch the movie (400 to 500kps rate of transfer), but beware you will need the Videolan player to view the TS file output on windows /mac / linux unless you convert the file using a software based format converter. If you wish to burn to DVD for viewing on a DVD player you will need to convert the file FOR SURE, as TS is not a widely supported DVD player standard.

Enjoy....

Wrap UP

I have recently purchased a single board computer platform called the WRAP, its a very small device, it runs fanless and thus is silent, the disk storage is compact flash card (read only) based. The CPU configuration is a 233 MHz AMD Geode SC1100 CPU (fast 486 core), the ram is limited to 128meg but the device as whole only pulls a very small 5 watts of power.

A full spec is here

The Operating system is Linux based, VOYAGE Linux, based on Debian. Why did i buy the device, well simply i like the idea of low power consumption devices, i can leave this device switched on comsuming VERY low amounts of energy. I use remote access via ssh to get to my systems, this means however i have to have 2 PC's switched on all the time, one for SSH forwarding and one for the target system i need to access (via my netscreen firewall). With the WRAP, i can have this low power consumption device switched on to act as the SSH forwarding device, i am also testing sending a 'wake on LAN' packet to the PC i need to access so that only consumes power when needed.

I will post after testing to publish the results

Humax boost

The Humax i posted about last, is now performing well, the solution was to install an amplified indoor aerial, the model which is working well for me (in fact better than my external connection) is shown below via Tesco direct, the exta model is a Technika TT-03 Amplified TV/FM Aerial.



http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.100-6444.aspx

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Human Humax

To err is human so the saying goes, however considering the 'HU' prefix of Humax implies 'human' i should have expected issues with my new freeview hard disk recorder, the Humax 9200T. I was a little surprised to have problems, even given the prefix, as Humax have an excellent reputation in this market sector.



I upgraded my receiver from a (£39) phillips set top box which had no issues apart from the odd hardware lock but since this was a monthly problem it was not a major pain. My signal strength for Freeview is not great in Upminster, however the phillips product had no issues with sound/vision or picking up channels.....The humax however suffers badly from pops,clicks and glitches with sound and vision on most channels, the twin tuner setup in the Humax must be slightly less sensitive than the phillips device. Thus i can't say the Humax is a bad product, its just my bad signal that is the issue. In fact the Humax device itself is a joy to use with nicely thought out functions and a logical series of steps for every function on the remote.



I would love to upgrade my aerial but the building lease prevents me from having my own antenna since i am in block of flats, the shared aerial is obviously the issue but the one issue i can't solve easily. Thus 8 out of 10 for the Humax device but Zero for my signal.



Link to Humax Site for 9200T

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sky is the limit

Its been a while since i posted, its been very busy in my worklife and i have been burning the candle at both ends lately, however the project i was heading has now finished, with the right ending thank god. Either way i thought i would comment on a couple of activities i have undertaken in my ongoing friends and family support.

Sky television recently launched a broadband service (based on the services easynet provided formerly (i think, as sky purchased easynet somewhile back)), the service includes a wireless package which i have installed twice now, once at my parents and once at my uncle's.

The package contains a nice netgear DG series router with pre installed wireless network name (SSID) of SKYXXXX where XXXX is an assigned number by sky, the wireless network being protected by pre configured WPA-PSK which is Wireless protected access pre shared key, which is lowest form of the WPA network encryption available (which is explained nice here at wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPA-PSK)

Both the installs worked well from the sky side but users need to be aware that before connecting your new or existing wireless card to the sky network (the password/key is provided on the underneath of the router and on a handy wallet card)that you should download and inastll the LATEST drivers from the cards manufacturers website (Difficult if this is your new connection or your PC does not have an ethernet port). The resaon is the drivers that are supplied on the CD with mosts cards can cause problems with WPA access, my fathers PC once connected to the netgear router simply rebooted, with the new drivers (from belkin) everything works very well.

Some things i would comment on regarding sky's wireless broadband
# Is it a Good idea having the access codes to wireless WPA network on the bottom of the router?

# Is it a good idea locking down access to the router by the user (yes from a corporate helpdesk perspective i would think)

# For users who have the sky TV box plugged into the telephone system, this can cause disruptions to service every 5 mins when the TV box 'calls home'.

# the speed seemed very good, but the reliability may in question as my father and uncle both have to power cycle the router once a week.

# good support at this website - http://www.skyuser.co.uk

Comments welcome....

Spool Dual

My friends and family support duties were again called on today. An old friends of mine Microsoft Windows 2000 professional operating system was behaving very strangely. The PC itelf was an Pentium 3 Dell optiplex 400 GXi with 256meg of ram, this previously had zipped along very well and was protected from viruses by AVG free edition but only had an anti spyware scanning utility from Adaware.

On investigation i found a rather nasty virus (see below on trend micro's site)

http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/default5.asp?VName=WORM_AGOBOT.ZH&VSect=T

The virus/trojan had backdoor capabilities and could be remote controlled from an IRC backend - NASTY. You can read how the virus operates above, its a real humdinger. I manged to remove it by booting into safe mode, running sysinternals 'autoruns' and disbabling the registry entry under 'image hijack', i then deleted the file it had associated with 'spooles32.exe'. I then installed fresh copies of AVG anti virus free edition (home use pc) and the very cool 'ewido' scanner. This last stage was removing the spyware elements for 'findthewebsitesyouneed.com' browser hijack. The whole project took a few hours, of in my view wasted time. I am trying to convince my pal to either switch to Linux or at least upgraede to XP to use the Windows definder protection, either way its at least another £80 that will need to be spent on securing a 'professional' operating system - (Sick)

Glimmer of Gentoo

Ok, so i had been playing around with linux for a few years, however it had been a long time since i reverted to base. I had just changed my test pc (AMD64 CPU 3200+, 512meg Ram, 40 Gb HDU, Nvidia FX5200) to run Fedora Core 5, The OS was nice and pretty, it was easy to use and configure and i felt RC5 was basically like playing with Microsoft XP (Like SuSE 10.1 OSS), i thought... TOO BORING.

I trashed the install and and decided to try and get 'geeky', i switched to gentoo, the install was CLI based you had to perform every install task yourself. However i had complete freedom to choose the software profile and get to compile the kernel and software myself (although compiling via the gentoo emerge tool is not really manually compilation), to be frank it was a challenge that i enjoyed.

I had never actually installed, for example GRUB, manually, normally i just install SuSE or Redhat and gleefully click my mouse or move the focus in an NCURSEs gui to get the GRUB software automagically installed.

I now have a fluxbox window manager with a manually configured Xorg X windows setup, everything configured with some CLI tools and the faithfull nano text editor.

I am now a happier person, the install task involved a real sense of learning and re learning aspects of Linux, by installing the 'gentoo' way, its great way of getting back to basics and i would say to anyone starting in Linux to take this route as if you can live with Gentoo, other distros will be easier to understand as you have a behind the scenes view with your gentoo experience.

A good way of thinking about this is if linux was a comedy experience, then Gentoo is a bill hicks video rather than SuSE/Redhat being a box set of friends episodes - a dose of reality!

Protect your Kids from Net Nasties

I was asked by some friends to help them with a problem relating to the internet. I had previously setup their home for wireless networking, allowing shared internet access for 3 computers via a nice Buffalo access point and an ADSL connection from the ISP Eclipse. The home network was locked down by both encryption and MAC addressing filtering which kept their network private from casual hackers.

Their problem lies in the fact that having multiple accesses to an internet connection allows their young children of 7 & 5 to have their own PC, running Windows XP and Internet explorer. Already their child had searched for 'crazy frog' (the ringtone cartoon character) on google and had been presented with a picture of a naked Frenchman thru one of the links!

Both their kids wanted to research homework, their own interests and of course games and toys, while not being victim to unpleasant content. Could I help?

Although you can set levels in Google to limit the search content and use the content settings in Internet explorer, the parents wanted something that provided rock solid content control that they could administer and have a log of what the children had searched for or tried to access.

I found them a great solution at www.surfsafe.co.uk . The guys at surfsafe keep a ‘black list’ of unsuitable content and thus have a database of all ‘net nasties’.

To use the service you sign up via the website (£3 a month) and download and install the ‘surfsafe’ software. To setup access levels you login to the ‘surfsafe’ web site, select each Windows XP account and setup the access level based on a system similar to rating cinematic films IE U/PG/18. Also, the user, via the website can set individual users access permissions based on categories of content, so for example your child could access the category ‘Search Engines’ but not have access to sexual content they found in a search from the site. It is all very simple to configure and designed for a non technical person.

In practice, the surfsafe software automatically loads and displays an icon in the system tray when a user logs into the computer. The user can browse the net as per usual, however when unsuitable content is requested thru the browser a ‘blocked’ message is displayed, then an entry is written to the online log so the ‘parent’ knows that ‘little jimmy’ tried to access a net nasty….

Surfsafe works very well and as a package is very good value, a hidden benefit is that it seems to block adverts and is a valuable tool in avoiding spyware as most ‘net nasty’ content is riddled with such software. The user can granulise the access rights so children can get suitable access no matter what their age and adult users can still access the content they desire. It’s a cool service and at £3 a month it’s a snap for all parents.

Hope this helps!

Coral Reef

I like to point other web users towards web sites that i find that really hit the spot in terms of being excellent in delivering the service they were designed to provide. A point in case being the online betting site provided by coral. The website is easy to use and really makes placing a bet a trivial task. The site also has online poker, with a JAVA application which works on my mac (!), an online casino, virtual sports (which is like a championship manager game for cash prizes), online slots and many many other cash games. Check it out for some low cost betting fun, i must admit that i do love my trips to vegas and this site keeps me going until my (now) annual vegas blowout.

Groove on Google

I was granted access to the recently released google pages creator, as my first effort using the new service from google, I very quickly created a home page for myself http://tonycossey.googlepages.com. The browser based software was slick and extremely easy to use and produced a nice result – which can be seen on the previous url mentioned. I tried the google software on XP with IE and with Linux on firefox, the firefox browser seemed to stall when clicking around the facilities like linking pages and inserting external urls but was flawless (so far) on IE. The whole process of page creation was simplified and its use anywhere nature makes it an excellent tool. The service was whole lot more integrated and WYSIWYG than blogger.com blog editing interface that I use on a regular basis. I have not yet tried the software on the powerbook/OSX/safari combination that I am using for this post. I am not entirely happy with the content on the new home page but that is something I will sharpen up in the coming days, the new page is a handy place to link to my blogs and use in my private email signature.

8 meg

I recently upgraded my broadband connection over ADSL to 8 meg, it was of those upgrades that does have an immediate impact on your way of working. My previous connection speed was 2 meg and to be honest i did not think that i would need any greater downloading muscle. However i helped a friend out who had purchased an 'ebay' laptop computer but lacked the funds for an operating system. I started the download of the excellent open source kubuntu operating system's cd image, normally i sit back and get on with something else but was stunned at the rapid download speed. It sound a little sad but seeing the 'wget' progress bar in my Linux command shell race across the screen i was feeling a little smug that i upgraded. My ISP Nildram, now owned by PIPEX and formerly owned by Mr Mardlin (yes nildram is mardlin backwards) have always provided me with a good service, apart from once being down for 4 days in a row, but 4 days in 5 years of service is not bad. I hope this 8 meg service upgrade does not effect their good record.

If you are considering upgrading your internet broadband service, i would say if you do download large files then go for it, but you just need simple web browsing, email and IM then stick to 512k or 2meg. Serial Music & Movie downloaders will love the new ADSL2's speedy downloads but as I buy all my music and movies legally, as i think this shows respect to the creator, this multimedia factor does not really effect me. On the illegal downloading subject matter i employ the following theory "As the creator has enhanced your life in some way, you shold pay back the favour".

Powerbook Widget

I published this post via the new OSX Tiger dashboard widget for posting to blogger.com. I must say its very simple and slick, just what i needed to quickly post and keep my eye on other data data such as stock prices on my powerbook dashboard. This type of application really in my thoughts constitutes what a 'killer' application is all about, however i wont rave on about it until i have used the tool for a few weeks to evaluate its stability and full feature set.....for the time bein however i am very impressed.

wynn las vegas

I have just returned from a trip to las vegas, i stayed at the wynn hotel and importantly managed to win overall on my betting, my average bet was over $100 and i enjoyed the roulette, blackjack and poker the wynn offered. As an IT professional i was impressed by the wynn in room systems, the large LCD hidef tv was supplied with a wireless keyboard (with trackball) and provided me with internet access as i did not travel with my trusty 12inch powerbook. The in room systems allowed all sorts of things to be checked in relation to your account, select movies & music plus local TV access. I think these basic services could be improved by adding access to your betting trends as a 'marked' player and allow you to book the golf, spa or in house eateries. I was surprised that wireless access via wifi was not supplied but i guess security concerns are part of that issue. Overall i was impressed by the wynn, the casino was excellent, the golf course was truly in great condition and provided a real test, the in room facilities were top class and i won! You Can't argue with that.....

Pool Playing

As some of you out there may know i am keen UK 8 ball pool player, i am the captain of the Cue ball bakers pool team who are current champions of a local Essex league, the blog is here at http://bakerspool.blogspot.com

I would advise any player to read this book as its great for the mind game involved with pool in all variations of the game

I am off to pool practice now with a few team mates, i bet 'how' i practice tonight is different from them after reading the book.

More tools, More Joy

Check these tools out,

http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/2006/PL2006SYSTEMUTILITIES.php

if you ever have to recover a Window$ XP machine after spyware or virus activity these tools are great. Also the startup monitors are cool for trimming down the 300 icons in the windows system tray.

The tools from sysinternals are absolute tiny and full of great features, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer and Autoruns are recommended above, copy on to your usb / stick memory. Regmon is ideal for spotting hijacks as it displays registry activity in real time.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities.html

Ideal for friends and family support