Category Archives: Applications

Pirates! Spammers! Gyroscopes! Bandwidth thieves!

This is officially getting ridiculous. Not only are my blogs getting a lot of comment spam, but my personal blog site is burning huge amounts of bandwidth, as particular (I assume zombie) hosts hit the site.

Below are the top ten bandwidth users of danielbowen.com for June:

Top 10 of 15312 Total Sites By KBytes
# Hits Files KBytes Visits Hostname
1 14380 4.10% 3801 1.77% 111235 2.22% 159 0.24% host-148-244-150-58.block.alestra.net.mx
2 17558 5.01% 3191 1.48% 99441 1.98% 157 0.24% host-207-248-240-119.block.alestra.net.mx
3 3927 1.12% 3640 1.69% 75989 1.51% 3 0.00% csr010.goo.ne.jp
4 3062 0.87% 2797 1.30% 74881 1.49% 171 0.26% rrcs-24-97-174-130.nys.biz.rr.com
5 3057 0.87% 2200 1.02% 62547 1.25% 392 0.60% msnbot.msn.com
6 2691 0.77% 2248 1.04% 60684 1.21% 153 0.23% 64.124.85.78.become.com
7 2256 0.64% 2082 0.97% 56383 1.12% 124 0.19% 98-101-196-200.linkexpress.com.br
8 2146 0.61% 2033 0.94% 51665 1.03% 279 0.43% dsl-250-198.monet.no
9 2001 0.57% 1755 0.82% 47605 0.95% 23 0.04% host133.sprintnetops.net
10 1686 0.48% 1571 0.73% 35979 0.72% 325 0.50% corporativos

It’s not like this site is hosting pr0n or something — there’s just no reason why any single host would need to grab 110Mb of traffic in a single month. In total traffic topped 4Gb for the month, which is ludicrous for a diary site with a few photos on it. 4Gb is actually my monthly limit — thankfully my web ISP isn’t too strict about charging extra for hitting that, but there’s always the risk if this is consistent that it’ll be costing me real money.

As a result I’ve started a list of bandwidth hogs’ IP addresses, which I’m putting in the .htaccess file. Anything with lots of hits and grabbing above about 5Mb per month is going onto the list, and the list is being duplicated (manually unfortunately) across to the other WordPress sites that I run.

Inspection of the access_log is particularly enlightening, with at present a staggering number of requests coming in with a referer at poker-related sites. Of the 6665 hits in the file for today (covering about 13 hours) there are 674 from texasholdemcenteral.com (note the wonky spelling) and 1212 from sportscribe.com. All of these too are now being blocked with a 403 (forbidden) via .htaccess.

Sigh. I suppose it’s just too much to expect people to place nice?

.htaccess extract – Feel free to copy for your own site to block miscreants.
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A buncha stuff

I don’t normally link to the excellent DailyWTF, because it’s full of good stuff, I’d be linking every day. But yesterday’s picture of the server room with a fishbowl to catch the airconditioner water outlet is an absolute classic. (Make sure you read the article as well as look at the picture.)

Classical music labels have criticised the BBC for offering Beethoven’s symphonies as a free download. This strikes me as a tad narrowminded. I’d imagine there’d be a number of people out there who might otherwise not be interested in classical music who might listen to these then go out looking for more to buy. (via Dave Winer)

Microsoft are now offering free evaluation sessions in their products, making use of their Virtual PC technology so you just try things out on a remote session via your browser and Citrix Java client.

New version of Firefox (1.0.5) is available, fixing some vulnerabilities.

Frontpage Express lives on

Want a cheap (free) and cheerful web page editor for Windows? Frontpage Express doesn’t handle niceties such as CSS, but it will do basic page editing, including things the latest versions of Word and Excel make a hash of, such as tables. It also doesn’t have the nasty hooks into Frontpage servers that the old full versions of FP had.

Originally it was bundled with IE4 and 5. It’s not officially available for download anymore, but Google can find it for you.

The amazing vanishing files

When you open an attachment in Outlook 2003, it saves it into a temporary directory then shells the appropriate program to open it. If you then do a Save As from that program, it defaults to that directory, which appears to be something like this:

c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK85\

A colleague of mine “lost” a bunch of files into there. Try and browse there through Windows Explorer, and you can’t find it. In fact you can get locked out of it even from the application Save As, if you go to the parent directory. The only way to get back in is to type the path manually, or search for the OLK85 directory on the filesystem.

To further confuse things, in a completely different directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent\

…are shortcuts for all those files in the OLK directory, which are back where we started:

Confused? I am.

The default temp directory is also in that general neighbourhood by the way, and deserves a cleanout every so often.

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp\

A quick look in mine for files more than a week old found 557 files taking 272Mb, as well as 38 directories with another 316Mb. Apart from a Temporary Internet Files directory in there, it all went happily to the recycle bin, and thence to Silicon Heaven.

Paint.net

Sick of MS Paint? Courtesy of the good people at Washington State University, try its free (and open source) replacement: Paint.Net. Packed with features, though a little slow on some computers if you leave the handy dandy transparent windows turned on.

While the multiple layers are great for a freebie product, would you honestly want to save all your graphical IP in its rare PDN format? Though arguably it’s at least partially future-proof as it’s open-source.

Paint.net requires the .Net Framework. By the way, how silly is this: the .Net home page contains no link to the Framework download. Obviously it’s a marketing site targetted at people who might be convinced to take on .Net as part of their IT strategy, but surely some of the people who hit it would be looking for the download so they can run some .Net program. Thankfully it is offered via Windows Update.

Music in Powerpoint

George Skarbek’s column in The Age this week answers this question:

Q: How can I set up a music file to play through an entire PowerPoint presentation? I can get it into one slide, but it stops when the slide changes. P. Turnham

My suggested answer: You shouldn’t. Are you trying to fecking torture your audience or what? Just because you found some tinny bit of computer music that would have the original composer turning in their grave doesn’t mean anybody else wants to hear it, let alone for the duration of a complete presentation. It’s crap, dude, pure crap.

Show your slides, know your facts, talk to your audience, take questions at the end, and don’t over-do the cutesy clipart or animations. That’s how to do it.

Office goes XML

Microsoft has announced the next version of Office will use XML by default — that is, Word, Excel and Powerpoint will use XML documents embedded in Zip files. They will also issue updates to those Office products back to the 2000 versions so they can use the new formats.

The XML will be documented, and open — to the extent that you will need to acquire a free licence from Microsoft to use it, on their terms presumably.

The terms of the licence will be interesting. You could contrast this to the MDB (Jet) format, which while it isn’t XML, and isn’t an open format, is quite well documented in its use via the various Microsoft libraries you can use to get at it (ADO/MDAC, DAO, etc). It’s interesting to note that Jet is royalty free, so you can give Jet databases to anybody if you have a Microsoft developer tool, though the one thing you can’t do is build a solution that does much the same thing as Microsoft Access. (It’s a similar story for all their other develop tools).

So the question is: will the MS licence preclude people from building, say, an alternative word processor or spreadsheet that can read and write the format? Will OpenOffice be able to use the format for interopability?

They imply no such restrictions will exist, with this to say on whether opposing products will make use of the format: Customers also know that the true value of a desktop application is not the format in which data is stored but the full breadth of capabilities offered by that application, along with the quality and security of the user experience that it provides — Steven Sinofsky, Senior VP, Office.

Obviously switching to XML opens up a number of possibilities, making it much easier for third party applications to delve into documents to read/write data, without mucking about in the Office object models (which in turn ties you to COM and Windows). You could use XSLT to convert documents into other formats, or to display on new devices or applications.

It should lead to interesting developments, and let’s hope the other Office applications follow suit.

XP logon screen tells you about unread mail

Okay, this is from the Windows XP logon screen.

XP Logon prompt: 188 unread mail messages

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I have nearly 200 unread mails, I want to know three things:

After all that messy anti-trust business, surely Windows XP and Office 2003 shouldn’t be so closely coupled as to provide this information on the logon screen.

Who decided providing this on the logon screen would be a good idea? What other surprise supposedly private items might popup for all to see?

How the smeg do I turn this off, while still using the Welcome screen, and preferably leaving Fast User Switching on?

This KB article describes it in more detail. I’ll need to do a little more digging to figure out how to turn it off.

Update 12:45pm. This article describes a registry hack that effectively disables it, by removing the privilege that updates the message count.

7:30pm. Yes, that registry hack seems to work. (And thanks to Wilson, who spotted it before I spotted it).

Upgrading OEM Nero 6

My new PC came with PowerProducer, which can produce DVDs, as well as an OEM version of Nero 6.0. On Tony’s recommendation I looked at the full version of Nero, but interestingly if you download and install the latest 6.6 version using your OEM licence, it doesn’t provide the MPEG-2 encoder required to produce DVD movies. To get that, you have to buy a key for the non-OEM version.

And before you suggest paying just for the upgrade from OEM to 6.6 non-OEM, it turns out that this special price isn’t available to users in Australia. Okay, so perhaps I could have lied and claimed to be in Europe or North America, but I have a nasty feeling that might lead to credit card complications further down the line. Thankfully the saving over the full version is only a few dollars, and even buying the full version online is heaps cheaper than going and buying a retail box.

So, after buying the full version key and re-installing 6.6, there it was, with DVD movie burning capability, and it seems to be a lot easier to use than the OEM PowerProducer, with a masterfully simple menu system letting you pick what kind of disc you want to burn. Now I can burn DVD movies of the kids’ antics for the family. (What, like I’d be using it for anything else??!) Obviously it lacks the subtleties of a more complicated DVD editing tool, but it’s good enough for me for now.

Using Atomz free search with WordPress

I’ve set up the Atomz free search to index both my old site toxiccustard.com and my personal blog at danielbowen.com together. Atomz allows you to specify multiple entry points for its crawler, putting all the specified sites into the one index.

Given the free search only allows 750 documents in its index, the catch with WordPress is to avoid it indexing individual blog entries, but doing the monthly pages instead. This is done using the URL Masks feature, so for instance with my blog structure of danielbowen.com/year/month/day/entry-slug I specify

exclude regexp http://www.danielbowen.com/..../../../*

The other ones I’ve excluded are RSS feeds (which it chokes on, and wastes processing time on), comments and category URLs.

exclude http://www.danielbowen.com/category/*
exclude http://www.danielbowen.com/comments/*
exclude regexp http://www.danielbowen.com/*/feed/*

This keeps my current total number of pages (both domains together) down to 519, which is pretty good, and well under the 750 limit for the freebie version.

It’s also handy in that the crawler logs broken links. I’ve got quite a few that have shown up as I move my old blog archives into WordPress, so I can just work through the list and fix them.

Is Windows getting too net-centric?

Searching Microsoft Office onlineIs Windows (and Office) getting too net-centric?

Case 1: Printer drivers

I hooked up my Lexmark E322 printer to my new computer. Windows XP recognised it, then wanted to go out onto the Internet to get the driver. But the computer’s not online yet. The XP CD apparently doesn’t have the driver. I suppose I could use a separate (online) computer to go to Lexmark’s web site and find a driver, but isn’t that over-complicating things? If XP knows what the printer is, why doesn’t it have the driver on the disc?

(Hey, here’s the web page for Lexmark’s E322 drivers. Someone please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke having three URLs embedded in one like that.)

Case 2: Office 2003 help

To take a theoretical example, search in Word Help for mail merge. It searches Office Online, then presents me with some options. The most useful one turns out to be on their web site.

Obviously having a lot of this content online is beneficial in reducing what is installed on local machines, and even the size of install packages on CDs. It also lets the vendors easily keep software and content up to date.

But… What if my network’s down for the day? What if I’m in a corporate environment and haven’t been granted Net access through the firewall? What if I’m setting up a PC for my mother to use just for word processing, with strictly no Net access?

Today I can re-install and use old versions of Windows, including printer drivers and application help, without network connectivity. Will the same be said for Windows XP in ten years? What if Microsoft drops support for it, including their online driver library? Will Office 2003 still have help available at the end of this decade?

Of course it’s not possible to keep users’ CDs or computers updated with the latest drivers and help files, but shouldn’t at least a basic version of these essential materials be available without network connectivity?

PS. Even after I did get the PC connected to the Innanet, when it tried to go get the driver by itself, it couldn’t find it. So I’ll be downloading it from Lexmark after all.