Author Archives: daniel

Just in case you need to know

My main web provider logs all their problems onto a fault-tracking database, and publishes them onto the Web, including via RSS, to make sure their customers are kept informed, and can work around things where necessary.

Even down to the most trivial thing.

We are currently experiencing issues with the on hold music on our telephone system. This is causing customers to receive silence when placed on hold. Periodic messages are still being played.

This will be rectified tomorrow morning.

Maybe I don’t need to know that, but it’s reassuring to know they’re being open and honest about any faults that occur. If only all companies were this open.

Spreading myths on FB

Oh jeez. Facebook is the new place where idiots forward hoaxes, including a reminder to forward it on to all your friends. All these were spotted on a single person’s wall:

“OMG this is amazing…. ever wanted to know who looks at your profile the most? to find out all you have to do is re post this to everyone on your friends list then press alt+f4 together then it should re-direct you to a status screen where it shows”

“BEWARE—— YOUR PROFILE: This is a message I received this morning. Someone is cloning our profiles. This person copies our pictures & creates a profile similar to ours. Then sends scrap, spam or garbage to our contacts or friends in Hi5 and other profile sites. Insulting them…or asking them personal information…Beware!!! Send this message to your friends, to prevent them from being offended in your name by other people. If you receive some junk mail from me, please inform me first, Ok? Send this to all your friends! REPOST>>>>”

“who has a crush on u?… man this is creepy its called mind reader. send this to every1 on ur list and then press F8 and ur crushes name will appear on ur screen”

“Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! To anyone with kids of any age, here’s some advice.
Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about eleven things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.”
… (Snopes entry)

Sigh. Sometimes the proliferation of this crap gets me down. How can so many in the human race be so gullible?

Kill the beep

When you want your PC to work silently, you switch Windows to a silent sound theme. But it still beeps at you for some things. Very irritating, especially when I’m trying to listen to music on headphones, to have an ear-shattering BEEP every time an email arrives or you dare to try and move the cursor beyond the end of the document in Wordpad. WhoTF decided it should beep for that anyway?

Solution 1: Double click on the volume control speaker icon. Options / Properties, and get it to display the PC Beep volume. Then mute the sucker.

But if there’s no sound devices on the PC, including a Virtual PC you’ve otherwise got the sound disabled on, you need to resort to other methods.

Solution 2: (Windows 2000 and later) net stop beep will stop the beeping for the current session.
sc config beep start= disabled will stop it permanently. Note the space after the equals sign.

(There are whackier ideas too, like recording silent WAV files to use for system events. And you could physically disconnect the speaker, if you have access to the hardware.)

Netspace shaping

Memo to self: when my ISP (Netspace) shapes after hitting the monthly download limit, they do not automatically unshape at the end of the billing period. You just have to disconnect and re-connect to get the proper speed back. Annoyingly, this information is nowhere to be found in their online help.

(It’s never happened to me before, which is why I didn’t know.)

The importance of filenames

When I’m putting PDFs (or any kind of downloadable file) on web sites, I’m always sure to publish them with a filename which is meaningful, including some indication of the web site it came from. ‘Cos if the average user is like me, they save PDFs etc all over the place, and some kind of identifier makes it heaps easier to find the file later.

It just works

I was very amused over the weekend to give an MPEG2 file on a USB drive to a couple of Mac addicts and watch them try to play it on their Macbooks. They were able to get the file off the drive with no problems, but Quicktime wouldn’t recognise it.

One of them ended up resorting to VLC, and it played… badly out of sync.

heh. Yeah. “It just works.”

Mind you, MPEG2 playback in Windows Media Player is choppy on one of my PCs, so I guess I can’t crow too much.

WTF is this icon?

This is driving me crazy.

Some process, somewhere, every minute is flashing up this icon in the status bar, momentarily grabbing CPU time and focus, and interrupting my workflow.

Unknown icon

I don’t know what it is. It’s too quick to right-click on to close or query it.

It’s even disruptive enough that I can’t capture it using PrintScreen; I had to grab it using a camera.

It’s similar in appearance to the MediaGate NDAS software, but that’s not it.

I think it only started happening a week or two ago, but you know how it is — I don’t recall what I’ve installed in that time. I know I upgraded iTunes, but I’ve already killed every Apple-related task I could find, and it’s still doing it.

Can anybody identify it?

WAIT A SEC. I did a search of all EXEs then scanned down looking at icons. It looks like it’s something to do with DivX. Hmmm.

More downloads at once

Normally you can only get two downloads from any one site happening at a time. But it can be overridden. I know, I know, you’re not actually meant to do this, as it breaks some HTTP standard or other. But occasionally it’s warranted… umm, if you’re talking to your own web server. Yeah.

Firefox: In about:config, go to network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server

IE 4+: Get in the registry and alter HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
— MaxConnectionsPerServer for HTTP 1.1
— MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server for HTTP 1.0

Apparently you can’t change it in Safari. (Anybody know better?)

Card number please?

Happy New Year.

Apart from my sister, my eldest also got an iPod Nano for Christmas. Thankfully here we use Windows, so unlike my sister, we didn’t have problems having to upgrade the OS to get it working.

He also got a $50 iTunes voucher. Very cool. So we logged onto Windows as him, and ran iTunes, so it would set up a music library for just him. Ran through the usual guff to get it started, and we set up his Apple ID so the voucher could be redeemed.

Problem: It wants a credit card number. He’s 12. He doesn’t have a credit card. Maybe we can skip this step? Nope. He’s got a $50 voucher, and no credit card, but it wouldn’t let us use the voucher without entering a card number. Idiots!

The workaround we ended up with was to put in my card details. Then we put the iTunes voucher number in, and went and found the option to remove the credit card again. And we had to change his name on the Apple ID, as it had assumed that my name from the credit card was the one to use.

Problem solved. But it shouldn’t be that hard.

Blog (noun)

I normally think of the term blog as being a web site of dated entries. As a noun, you can have a blog. As a verb you can blog (eg post) something to it.

It would seem there are people out there using the word blog to mean what I would normally call a blog post:

I’m back, starting with an apology for the lack of blogs over the last few months.

Garry McGhie, V/Line

Not to single this instance out, because I’ve seen other examples of this use around the place, too. But it just doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Wiktionary / Dictionary.com / Urban Dictionary / Merriam-Webster / YourDictionary.com / Encarta — All these appear to agree with me.