This is utterly awesome. This guy (with a good dose of humour) has started with MS DOS 5, and Windows 1, and followed the upgrade path all the way through to Windows 7.
(Spotted on Twitter, but it’s doing the rounds of Reddit and other places.)
Author Archives: daniel
AU timezones
I’m not happy when I see someone technical quoting a time in summer (eg during daylight savings) which claims to be “AEST”.
It’s almost certainly actually AEDT.
A summary of the abbreviations, which looks reasonably official, is here: Australian timezones.
In summary, AEST, ACST and AWST apply in winter. AEDT, ACST and AWST apply in summer.
The other issue I had with a recent email was it said 12:00pm AEST. I think in this context, they meant midnight AEDT, but it’s confusing. Better to either say Midnight, or use 24-hour time: 00:00.
GMail irritation #2
I love GMail, and this error probably seemed like a good idea when they coded it…
…but it’s just irritating.
Please trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know I’m replying to something in the Trash. I don’t care if the sent copy isn’t saved… invariably it’s going to an email list which I have no interest in archiving for myself when it’s stored on Yahoo’s servers or whatever.
So I don’t need this error popping up unpredictably multiple times to interrupt me, when I’ve seen it hundreds of times before.
In fact despite the wording, I didn’t save the message. GMail auto-saved it for me.
And when I send the email, just to cap it off, I get this:
1. These shouldn’t even be Errors. They should be Warnings.
2. How about an option to turn these warnings off, once and for all?
Amusing comment spam
Amusing comment spam left on my personal blog:
Spammers leave spam comments in the belief that they will gain better search engine rankings and traffic by building as many links to their websites as possible. Spammers often employ bots or other automated systems to look for mortgage blog and website and leave self serving promotional comments links..Spam is a numbers game so if spammers can send automated spam to large numbers of websites for very little money so even if they convert a small percentage of the sites they spam they can make a profit..Spammers will also leave links to their websites in an attempt to push link juice or Google Juice to their websites but most mortgage websites and blogs add a rel nofollow tag to prevent the passing of pagerank or link juice.
And this one, from a user apparently who signed him/herself “penis enlargement”.
It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website penis enlargement [url deleted] I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT!
Regards: PoormanBH2011
Yeah right. Like I’m going to approve that.
BTW, both were caught correctly by Akismet.
IP addresses run out
At 9:30 US EST (14:30 GMT) today, the official announcement that IPv4 addresses have run out is expected. It’ll be webcast live from Miami.
On Thursday, 3 February 2011, at 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) [14:30 UTC /GMT], the Number Resource Organization (NRO), along with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) will be holding a ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses.
Update Friday:
The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.
How many Commodore 64s were sold?
A post for the nostalgics to read:
Email startup times
A quick timing test on my main home workhorse computer, which isn’t the fastest in the world, but isn’t the slowest either. (Windows 7, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4400+ 2300 Mhz, 3 Gb RAM, on a fast ADSL2+ net connection.)
Having started Windows and logged onto a clean desktop:
- Start Chrome with GMail set as the home page: 8.5 seconds to ready
- Start Thunderbird: 11.6 seconds to ready
No wonder people are heading into the cloud.
Subsequent timings (without a reboot, so some things may be cached, eg later in a session when you’ve closed your email and you want to go back in):
- Chrome with GMail: 3.4 seconds
- Thunderbird: 3.1 seconds
Interesting.
Connecting to a Windows shared drive: Domain user works, local user fails
(Apologies for the long title. I’m hoping Google indexes this well so some poor sod who gets this problem will easily find it the solution.)
Many problems the other day trying to connect a shared drive on a server (Windows 2008) on a domain, but with a local user.
It would work from some hosts, but not others — returning enigmatic errors hinting that the username/password combo was wrong.
C:\>net use z: \\servername\testdir /user:servername\test Password! System error 1326 has occurred. Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.
The weird thing was, using a domain logon would work every time.
We thought it might be dependant on whether the hosts were in the same domain, but it looks like it’s related to the version of Windows being used… with later versions able to connect okay.
I did wonder at the time if it might be due to a weird security policy setting, and that turned out to be right. It seems later versions of Windows Server have stricter security settings.
After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, then some Googling, I eventually found the solution here:
- On the server, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Local Security Policy
- Local policies / Security options
- Check out the Network Security LAN Manager Authentication Level option
- If it’s set to “NTLMv2 response only” or similar, then change it to “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”
Voila.
This MSKB article has some material on it: Q823659 — it’s helpfully buried with lots of other security policy settings. Look about two-thirds of the way down for “Network security: Lan Manager authentication level”.
If the policy is set to (5) Send NTLMv2 response only\refuse LM & NTLM on the target computer that you want to connect to, you must either lower the setting on that computer or set the security to the same setting that is on the source computer that you are connecting from.
Yes, I suppose I could work out how to change the client host to use NTLM V2. But I really don’t want to break anything else.
Oh, and the KB article almost gleefully notes something we saw when wrestling with this:
One effect of incompatible settings is that if the server requires NTLMv2 (value 5), but the client is configured to use LM and NTLMv1 only (value 0), the user who tries authentication experiences a logon failure that has a bad password and that increments the bad password count. If account lock-out is configured, the user may eventually be locked out.
Beautiful.
Microsoft’s open-source CMS
Interesting — Microsoft has launched its WebMatrix open-source web development bundle, as well as the first version of its open-source “Orchard” content management system.
Wonder if these means MS has WordPress, Joomla and Drupal as its targets? Perhaps it’s realised that having some kind of open-source CMS is vital to winning the hearts and minds of web programmers, and weaning them off PHP and MySQL back to ASP.Net and SQL Server.
(via Mary-Jo Foley)
Facebook: Download your information
I had a quick look at Facebook’s Download Your Information feature — evidently added a few months ago due to criticism about the accessibility of people’s data once it’s dumped into the Facebook bottomless pit.
You can find it via the My Account screen, by clicking Download Your Information.
It asks for some time to compile all the information — in my case this took about half an hour — then emails you to say it’s ready to download, and provides a link and re-checks your password.
It comes as a single zip file, with HTML and pictures inside it.
Opening the index.html file, you’ll find a version of your Profile page, with links to all the other information in the archive, including Wall, Photos, Friends, Events, Messages.
The Wall in my case was 1.5 Mb of HTML, going back to 2007, and I suspect is every Wall post (and replies from friends) I’ve ever made. Friends is just an unlinked list of all your friends (name only). Messages has all your message threads, and replies.
You can browse the photos via the directory of the same name; subdirectories reflect the folders. It looks like all the photo files are at the size that Facebook shrunk them down to when they were uploaded.
To actually get this information into another service, you’d need to do some trickery with munging the HTML. The code they’ve used seems relatively clean and easy to parse.
So all in all, quite a handy feature, and goes a long way towards dispelling fears that information pumped into Facebook was lost forever behind a zillion clicks of to show “Older Posts”.
(It doesn’t appear that Twitter has a comparable feature.)
Gmail irritation #1
Sometimes Gmail decides your session has expired, when you’re in the middle of writing an email.
If you’re lucky you might be able to copy the text from the draft out. If not, the most recently saved draft may or may not be up to date.
This is bad design. Why interrupt like this when you’re in the middle of something?
If you must have sessions that expire, than at least give the user a bit more time to actually finish what they’re doing — send and/or exit the draft — and then ask them to logon again.
uTorrent crapware
The latest version of uTorrent comes with an unwelcome friend — some kind of app host called Conduit, and a waste-of-time toolbar in IE and Firefox.
I don’t know if they’re dangerous or not (you’d hope the uTorrent people wouldn’t have allowed them in if there was any risk), but I certainly think they’re unwelcome, and the semi-auto update from the previous version of uTorrent didn’t give me the option of having them or not.
To remove them, go into Control Panel, Add/Remove programs and remove:
Conduit
uTorrent toolbar
You’ll also need to go into Firefox and in Tools, Addons, do the same.
That seems to do it (touch wood). uTorrent, unsurprisingly, seems to work fine without them.
Hey uTorrent guys, love your product, but stick to your core business, eh? Don’t let bundled crapware like this drag you down.
Update 24/12 — also noted: it changes your Firefox home page without asking, too.