Category Archives: Platforms

CallerID blocking backfires

Every employment agency I’ve come across uses CallerID blocking on their phones. When they phone, it’s a surprise who they are.

I’m not sure why they do that, perhaps it’s to prevent embarrassment when they’re calling candiates on a landline at work… but I can’t think of anyone who would give their work number in their contact details.

So I got a call from an agency. I went through my normal routine of answering a phone, where I announce my name. The agent asked “Is that John Parris?” to which I responded in the negative. “Oh, right, Josh, sorry” says the agent, obviously having misread my name. And before the caller could identify themselves, the call disconnected, no doubt as a function of it being a mobile telephone call. He never called back (perhaps he thought I hung up intentionally), and I couldn’t call him back because I had no idea who/where he was. Let’s face it, they all look and sound the same, so agencies all blur together anyway. I would have thought they’d want to stand out, or at least leave a number they could call back on.

Can anyone suggest why agencies use CallerID blocking?

On and about Google video

Very funny: Why Macs suck (Warning, occasional coarse language)

Speaking of Google Video, they now let you download Google Video (GVP) files and the Player onto Windows or Mac, Video iPod or Sony Playstation Portable. They’ve also got a thing producing the HTML to show the video on your own web site.

Emergency 000 vs 112

If you’ve ever wondered what the difference between the Australian emergency number 000 and the European standard 112 is, check this Australian Communications Authority document.

In past years 112 had network priority and other advantages that 000 didn’t, including working without a SIM, and when the handset is keypad locked. This is no longer the case, as most handsets and SIMs now sold in Australia have a firmware modification to treat 000 just as well as 112. My own handset, a two-year-old Nokia 6100, will happily accept 112 or 000 even when keylocked. (No, I didn’t press the dial key when trying this.)

The stuff on page 10 reveals just how ignorant of emergency numbers some people are, despite 000 being “it” for decades. Mind you, I’m not sure why they don’t make moves to allow 112 from fixed line phones, for the benefit of overseas visitors.

Oh, there’s also 106 for Telephone Typewriter (TTY) users. So far there’s no SMS-capable emergency number. But it’s notable that an emergency call where the operator can’t hear the caller is diverted to a recorded service allowing the caller to press “55” to indicate an emergency if they can’t talk, allowing the call to be passed back to the operator or police, and CLI to be used to despatch a response. Good thinking, whoever thought that up.

Commonwealth Games patch

The Commonwealth Games are looming, as is the week’s extension of summer time in Eastern Australia.

Microsoft have issued a patch for most (but not all) versions of Windows. What they haven’t done is made it an automatic update for affected users, nor made it easy to find — it’s not shown on the Microsoft Australia home page, for instance, you have to search for it. They also haven’t provided a smooth way of reverting to “normal” summer time for next year: users have to remove the patch and manually set the timezone.

Meanwhile Apple have done… nothing. Charles Wright has tracked down how to fix it on Macs, which involves going an finding a timezone update file on an ftp server, untarring and ungzipping, running an obscure (if you’re not a Unix god) command… jeez.

Ask yourself: is the typical non-geek computer user going to seek out these solutions, and even if they find them, are they going to bother to figure it out and do it? I’m betting not. I’m betting a lot of computers will be an hour out during the week of the summer time extension.

This is very sloppy behaviour from both sides of the OS fence, and something the millions of Australian computer users won’t be too happy about in March. (Though most will have forgotten about it by late-April, no doubt.)

PS. 29/3/2006. Still getting a lot of comments here, but there is a later post on this topic here.

Macs to run Windows?

Australian Personal Computer: Will Intel-based Apple Macs be able to run Windows? Apple says they’re not doing anything to prevent it. Their Macs will use an Extensible Firmware Interface, which replaces the BIOS, and Windows Vista will support EFI.

Would be pretty cool to have the lovely Apple design for your hardware, plus the lovely Apple OS, but be able to boot into Windows when compatibility was needed.

WWW button nobbled (sometimes)

My keyboard has a Web button on it, which as you’d expect opens up my web browser.

Like all right-minded people, I have this set up in Windows’ “Set program access and defaults” screen to go to Firefox.

But if I press the button when a Windows Explorer window is open (eg browsing a directory) it goes to IE in that window, instead. Hmmm.

A Windows user’s adventures in Linux

Linux penguinFollowing the comments posted in various forums which espouse the various benefits of Linux and having a need to test a setup of “MySQL” database engine, I though, well, lets give this ‘Nix thing a go.

So these observations which follow are of my first encounter with Linux (which occurred about a month ago – early Dec). They are offered for general interest and likely amusement of the ‘Nix aware among you. These comments are longish – but contain just some of the many items I observed.

Remember, this from a person who has never seen or run Linux before spending all my time with various flavours of DOS & Windows.

Firstly, I had armed myself with a couple of different books – a copy of “Fedora Core 4 Unleashed” and a “Linux Pocket book”, both containing recent Fedora core distributions. (online download of ISO vs. Dialup? Hardly. Plus there were instructions in those books)

Then, after checking minimum hardware requirements in the books, I threw together a basic “no frills” PC running what appeared to be more than adequate – P3 600, 3/4 gig Ram, 40 gig HDD, Basic LAN card, old DVD reader, old TNT video, no floppy, no sound, no extras. It booted – good.

Loaded the DVD from the Unleashed book into the drive and hit the reset button. The Linux installer fired up & gave Text or Graphical installer options. I’m a Windows Bloke – so, naturally, I chose Graphical. Spent some time accepting defaults for the disk partitioning and making various choices about what to install. I have no idea what some of ’em related to… but what the heck. Finally get to the “OK, now install it all” & waited….

.. till the installer crashed PRIOR to the disk partitioning step.

U-huh.

Rebooted, started again. This time selected TEXT mode installer.

After quite some time, a couple of dialogs, nominate root password and a *single* reboot (well, now, there is a plus) I was looking at a login screen. OK, so what now?

Login as root. Graphical desktop. U-huh. (Gnome desktop by default, although I believe KDE was also available – I certainly didn’t know enough to feel the need to alter their default choice). Start button (OK, or whatever Fedora calls it) is at top left, not at bottom. I can deal with that. Menu’s …. Goodo. Found a menu item to create user accounts. Umm. Made a user account – yeah, I know you shouldn’t use root accounts for general work. Bloody hell, I wanna share with my Win network, but it would NOT let me create a Login that matched what is already in use on the Win network – I currently use, my logins have a space in ’em… like “Dave Jenkins” Nix didn’t like that. Subsequently my fears that this might cause problems were proved founded!

Anyway created new user account, validated it on my Win box, logged in to Fedora with that.. righto, so now what? From a shell (what, coloured background by default… ummm different) established that MySQL had loaded, and from MySQL docos got the server process running. Great. Now to share it on the network.

Network sharing? Samba, right? Well, frig me, if it didn’t take at least 4 – 5 hours arsing around before I could even get the thing to see my Windows network, let along get it to be able to transfer files back & fwd. At one point, late the first day, I could see Windows shares from Nix, but not the other way. I turned both PCs off and started again the next day – only to fine that, without any further setting changes, Windows could now see ‘Nix shared folder. U-Huh. I cannot explain it – maybe, at that time, like me, the PC had had enough. Combinations of needing new logins created on a Windows box, along with some funny settings (I’ll prolly never find again) which match Windows/sambo logins with local IDs… Certainly it was not easy. I knew that I need to set certain IP settings to what values, but ya think I could easily find where? Of what the new terminology was?

Then to Printers….

Several attempts with different (why would you have several seperate ways to hook up a printer?? At least one I know was referred to as “CUPS”) setup tools, I finally found I had to BLINDLY enter the mappings to the location of the PC/Printer name, ‘cos Nix would not show the printer even existed until AFTER the password access to the printer had been validated. Security, bah… Anyway, I finally got Writer (OpenOffice) to send a formatted line of text to my Windows Printer.. although I did not understand, nor bother, about the cryptic error in the dialog I received AFTER the print had been generated.

And speaking of Security….

Bloody hell. I know many, if not most will want and need a *secure* PC to protect from nasties. In this particular case, I did not. Quite the reverse. This was to be used to test on a local controlled private network. It would never see Internet or unknown source disks and so would not be at risk from foreign nasties. Ya think I could find someway to turn off the high level of security? Fat chance! Every time I tried to do anything I was prompted for the Root Password. Got to the stage where I gave up and was logging in a root to avoid this problem. I couldn’t find a way to get the thing to auto-log in. And I never managed to unbar the ports that MySQL used so I could get to it from a Windows box.

And what’s with everything being configured by TEXT files? Every item in the books say launch this or that config file… (which, when finally found and opened, all, remarkably, look like “ini” files). Now didn’t Windows move on from config by ini files about a decade ago? And unlike the old system & Win inis, it seems to me that there are bazillions of those config files… and not all in the same place either.

And a bunch of other things. A simple “Dir” in the shell doesn’t work. I know its different, but why does EVERYTHING have to be different at the command prompt, but appear like Windows in the GUI? Windows CLEARLY displays my different drive volumes – yeah I s’pose you’d get use to the “mount point” system… but I like my drive letters. Why doesn’t a DVD/CD get auto recognised when you are logged in at the command line? Manual mounting? How quaint…

Open Office “Write” initially looked like Word. Could get to work straight up in there. Ditto for whatever the Excel replacement was (Calc?). GIMP? I’d expect to need a bunch of time to get used to their idea of an interface. Gnome desktop – I could find NO WAY to alter what items appeared in their Applications menu. Further, installing more apps from the disk using the GUI installer changed NOTHING in that menu. I’m not saying it can’t be changed… it’s prolly in a config file somewhere!

Summary: You want to “get to work” straight away? Then stick with what you know. If you want to learn something VERY different – then by all means, try Linux (or Unix or FreeBSD or…). But do not believe what you may have heard that “it is easy” or “you will be up and running quickly”. Expect to take a long time before you’ll be productive. I think some of these “it’s easy” comments may come from people who are familiar with Nix but who have forgotten the various difficulties they first experienced. Remember your first System.ini edit? Or your first venture into ANSI prompt commands?

After this little adventure, I then hear that this, that or the other flavour of Nix would have been better because…. <insert reasons> Well, I am not so sure.

After all that, yeah, I’d have a similar bunch of comments if I was an old UNIX user trying Windows for the first time. I’m not trying to say that Nix doesn’t have advantages or that Windows is better. All I’m trying to say is that there is a *considerable* learning curve to the change.

Two parting comments:
1) After chewing up the better part of two full days (about 1 month ago), that particular Nix PC has sat idle – I’m back to my comfortable and familiar Windows world.
2) The MySQL test install which prompted al this? I dropped down a Windows version, installed it to a XP “server” box, and was up and running remotely from my Windows desktop creating tables and queries *within an hour*.

So, you Nix people, go on, have your chuckle. Now is where you tell me all that I did wrong….

Dave

Windows Search

Windows indexing processI love Windows Desktop Search. (The others from Google et al are probably just as good). It makes it so much easier to find files. My colleagues are amazed that I can find old emails so quickly.

But why is it that on both the machines I’ve installed it on, the indexing process hangs about like a bad smell, interrupting what used to be a smooth shutdown? Not every time mind you, but consistently enough to be very irritating. Surely it’s not that hard to gracefully have your process detect that the operating system is shutting down, and quietly go with the flow?

Maybe I should switch to that Google one. I wonder if it talks to Exchange?

Don’t panic, DON’T PANIC!

Oh joy! Reports of a really bad exploit in WMF, which will affect fully patched Windows XP systems. Ed Bott sums it up nicely:

This is a zero-day exploit, the kind that give security researchers cold chills. It works by exploiting a weakness in the Windows engine that views graphics in the Windows Metafile (WMF) format. You can get infected by simply viewing an infected WMF image.

Fun stuff. Until there’s a patch, beware the metafile, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Update Saturday: Some computers are already protected from this, via Data Execution Prevention. Read about it (including how to check) here.

Adventures with the Windows XP video screensaver

Doctor Who trailerA new trailer for Doctor Who, so time to switch my screensaver to playing videos again.

The old Windows XP Video Screensaver (once a semi-official MS Powertoy), in my humble opinion was always a bit dodgy (some of the options never worked, for instance, and it would stop working if you upgraded Windows Media Player 9 to version 10).

Happily it’s been superseded by a newer seemingly fully official Microsoft video screensaver (requires Windows genuine validation).

A catch though: the video I wanted to play was MPEG2, and both the old and new screensavers choked on it on one machine, even though MediaPlayer would happily play it. The whole machine would turn to mush.

Plan B was to try and convert the MPEG2 to WMV, by simply loading it into Windows Movie Maker. Oddly, WMM wouldn’t read it.

I noticed a process called igfxext.exe ended up grabbing way too much CPU than is sensible. The errant EXE is associated with Intel graphics adapters, and evidently under some circumstances decides to go ape when MPEG2s come along.

Through this page I found that PowerDVD (which evidently does some of the work playing MPEG2s) needed patching.

This done, and things started to behave. Almost. It wouldn’t crash, but performance was crap. Probably the onboard video not cutting it.

I tried Windows Movie Maker again. This time it worked. Converted it to WMV, plays okay now, and while the quality isn’t as good (what is the deal with Movie Maker and its restrictive output options, anyway?!), it hardly matters that much for a screensaver.

(The other machine has a decent video card, and plays the MPEG2 okay.)