How much memory should you have in your PC? How about 8Mb? #BackToThe90s

Charles Wright, the IT whiz who writes regularly in The Age Green Guide, and has a persistent habit of referring to himself in the plural, reckons in his latest column that you should have eight megabytes in your PC, but soon it'll be practical to have up to sixteen megabytes.

This quarter the price of RAM has jumped about 60 per cent as manufacturers shift the emphasis to production of mobile memory, squeezing supply of PC memory. The 8MB of Kingston RAM that we recommend is now $60, compared with $38 in December.
…
It's possible to see the future of desktop computing contained in a diminutive box into which the customer can stuff as much as 16MB of RAM and a fast mSATA SSD drive, at prices ranging from $500 to $700.

— The Age, 28/3/2013

Wow, don't go overboard on the RAM there Charles.

Charles Wright's column in The Age, 28/3/2013

New monitor

Mostly for my own records:

Since one of my two Samsung 940N 19″ monitors (bought in 2006) developed a horizontal line through it, I’ve replaced it with a 23.6″ Philips 247E3LSU2, which was $168 from Officeworks.

Bigger monitors wouldn’t really fit into the space.

It’s plugged into “Calculus”, the Mac Pro. I should get a DVI-D cable to get the best picture quality out of it… amazed at how damn expensive they can be retail. I’ve ordered one from DealExtreme instead (no particular rush – the VGA cable I have may not be optimum, but it works).

Much spam from iCMG/KnowledgeHut/bmsend

At work I’m getting repeated spams from one mob which send surprisingly similar emails about conferences and training from various domains, which include:

enterprisearchitecturetrainingtoday.com
businessawards2013.com
BPMArchitects.com
newbpmtraining.net
myenterprisearchitecture.com
telcoarch.com
thebpmtraining.com
businessintelligencelive.com (added 2014-01-13)
enterprisearchitecturetrainer.com (added 2014-04-01)
mycloudcomputingtrainingnow.com (added 2014-04-07)
sixsigmaaccreditation.com — (added 2014-07-24 — also noted use of the brand name KnowledgeHut )
itilfoundationoceana.com — (added 2014-08-06 — still using KnowledgeHut name)
Sent by pmta90.dedicated.bmsend.com on behalf of BusinessAnalysisProgram.com (added 2014-08-18)
primeverastudy.com (added 2014-08-26)
mybusinesscasewriting.com (added 2014-09-16)
finance4nonfinace.com (added 2014-09-16)
ApacheHadoopbootcamp.com (added 2014-09-18)
pmtrainingPrograms.com (added 2014-09-18)
sixsigmaforbeginers.com (added 2014-09-26 — note typo)
msptrainingnow.com (added 2014-09-26)
mspaccreditationnow.com (added 2014-09-30)
prince2bootcamptoday.com (added 2014-09-30)
pmprojectnplanning.com (added 2014-10-03)
myprince2certification.com (added 2014-10-13)
mspbootcamptoday.com (added 2014-10-15)
ITILfoundationgulf.com (added 2014-10-22)
financialmodelinginexcel.com (added 2014-10-27)
scrumbootcampnow.com (added 2014-10-30)
knowledgehutglobal.com (added 2014-10-30)
businesssuccesstrainings.com (added 2014-11-10)
primeveratraining.com (added 2014-11-14)
sixsigmaintialsquare.com (added 2014-12-09 — note it appears to misspell “initial”)
projectmgmttoday.com (added 2014-12-19)
businesscasewritingcourseware.com (added 2014-12-19)
mspadvancecoursefinder.com (added 2014-12-19)
agilescruminitiatives.com (added 2015-01-12)
fpasnap.com (added 2015-01-13)
itilfoundationstudy.com (added 2015-01-22)
financialmodelingnexcel.com (added 2015-02-17)
scrumaccreditationcase.com (added 2015-02-17)
pgmpinitiatives.com (added 2015-03-05)
pmcertin.com (added 2015-02-17 — includes “itilsearch.com” in unsubscribe links)
sixsigmalearnings.com (added 2015-02-17 — other domains mentioned include bmsend.com, bmetrack.com, alliancestudy.com)
agileinitiatives.com (added 2015-03-11)
hadoopclassroomwork.com (added 2015-03-11)
pmprojectsolutionprogram.com (added 2015-03-16)
scrumtrainingtoday.com (added 2015-04-10)
global-health.com (added 2015-05-14 — using bmsend.com… Is this ICMG branching out into health services, or a different company making use of the same spam sending service? Looks like the latter. They even quote an Melbourne address: Level 2, 607 Bourke Street)
prepmtrain.com (added 2015-06-25 — also quotes pmatsearch.com in the dodgy unsubscribe link)
businesscasewritinginfo.com (added 2015-07-15)
cbapcourses.com (added 2015-07-15)
BusinessanalysisProfessionals.com (added 2015-07-15)
msproject2013tutor.com (added 2015-07-21)
businesscasewritingnewapps.com (added 2015-08-24)
agileandscrumintro.com (added 2015-12-02)
projectmanagementgain.com (added 2015-12-02)
itilpractice.com (added 2015-12-02)
msprojectmethods.com (added 2015-12-10)
Pythonread.com (added 2015-12-10)
bcwbusiness.com (added 2015-12-10)
businesscasewritingnow.com (added 2015-12-22)
learnbusinesscase.com (added 2015-12-22)
itilfreshtutor.com (added 2016-04-06)
coreproject.co (added 2016-04-06)
androiddevelopmentnow.com (added 2016-04-06) – emails include subject lines proclaiming “Learn Andorid”!
officepersonalsecretary.com (added 2016-04-06)
projectsmgmts.com (added 2016-04-28)
msprojectnewprofessional.com (added 2016-05-18)
sixsigmaapps.com (added 2016-05-18)
prince2newsession.com (added 2016-05-18)
Professionalsofbusinessanalysis.com (added 2016-06-21)
deftanalyze.com (added 2016-06-21)
skillcentrics.com (added 2016-06-21) – used as a Reply-To address
bigdatahadooptutors.com (added 2016-06-21)
iosdvptraining.com (added 2016-06-21)
angularjsconceptstraining.com (added 2016-06-21)
pm-careers.com (added 2016-06-22)
Latestprojectmanagement.com (added 2016-06-22)
scrumstudies.com (added 2016-06-28)
scrummasterscert.com (added 2016-06-29) – this appears to be sent via mailerinteractive.com
elationproject.com (added 2016-07-04)
itsm-skills.com (added 2016-08-23)
certs-skill.com (added 2016-08-23)

Apart from using many different domains, these guys also continually change the address within the domain, and Outlook doesn’t appear to be able to consign an entire domain to the blocked senders list.

Many include this footer:

You are receiving this e-mail because you happen to be either our client or were added to our comprehensive database on account of your contribution in the IT domain. However, should you no longer wish to receive any further mails from our side, please Click here Unsubscribe iCMG | Level 9, Avaya House, 123 Epping Road, North Ryde, NSW.| Phone +61 2 8005 0977

…but of course I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work… it probably only served to prove to them that mine was a live address.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the street address quoted is a serviced office.

I have been putting these domains into the spam senders list in Exchange, but they still get through. I can only assume that the list in Exchange is a “soft” one.

Annoying.

I have, of course, passed on a spam message to the ACMA spam reporting people… but I don’t hold out much hope of any success there.

I’m adding additional domains as they come up — when I get the chance. It’s interesting to see that some of them include spelling errors; most are just semi-random buzzwords stuck together.

WordPress Content Disappeared

While editing a WordPress post the other day I clicked on Add Media before I had saved or published the draft.

When I tried to upload the image I received the error WP couldn’t write to the disc. Odd. I then returned to editing and went to save a draft before I investigated what was going. Then I got the error that I was unable to save the past as the post did not exist. I returned to the the Dashboard and there were no posts or pages, only a few categories and comments.

I tried to look at the site’s home page but it returned the error the no content could be found in that category. All my posts were gone and no media was listed in the media library when I logged in again. The admin section worked fine, the page template displayed but there was no content for the pages.

The problem was a corrupt database. To solve the problem of WordPress content that has disappeared just run Repair on your tables using PHPMyAdmin and your site will come back to life.

Thunderbird does error message wrong

Thunderbird discovered that yahoo have changed their mail server’s POP3 behaviour, meaning you can’t leave mail on their server and download it locally. So it pops up the following message box:
POP3 has failed
This message box is app-modal. You can’t just fix the problem, you’ve got to take notes (a screenshot suffices) and then fix the problem. A bunch of faffing around, when it could have just said “Do you want your Server Settings automatically changed so that your mail can be fetched? Yes/No”. Or you could have this pile of technical information in a non-modal dialog box, and bring up the settings dialog for the user to solve the problem. Or just have this pile of technical information in a non-modal dialog box, so a screenshot isn’t necessary.

Or you could just make people angry, that works too.

Error code L6

If you have an ACS-15 digital scale beeping and flashing error code L6 on the LED display, I think it means “battery undercharged, and I refuse to work until it’s better charged. I don’t care if you plug me into the mains.”

And now Google knows. I wonder where I put the instructions?

Microsoft security bulletins using software “not licensed for commercial use”

I can’t help noticing that in the last couple of weeks, Microsoft’s security bulletin emails have been sent as PGP signed messages using a copy of PGP Desktop that is “not licensed for commercial use”.

...
This newsletter was sent by:
Microsoft Corporation
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, Washington, USA
98052


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP Desktop 10.2.0 (Build 1950) - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com
Charset: utf-8

wsFVAwUBURwisxWqSyu+jsPhAQjyGQ//fj/k7Fb2zIr2gcINPs66n3SAEdNp41eO
mvTuT/knbPdZNhECQaFcQulaTgOgUDMCIVPT+NWTWBBuoqaXUuMhPKMaro6Bv0Be
...

I suppose a small struggling startup company like Microsoft can be excused for not paying to update keep their commercial licence up to date.

Netbook won’t run video-editing software: film at eleven

So apparently some of the computers bought with Digital Education Revolution money are underpowered for the software suite loaded on by state education departments.

The Lenovo netbooks handed out to NSW students in 2009 and 2010 sport a 1.66MHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 2GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive and 10-inch screen

A rig with these spacs this is my primary Windows machine, and for a while was the most powerful machine in my house.  It’s fine for not playing HD video or anything that challenging, although operating without the (maximum) 2 gig of RAM is a weedy beast (the raw boot memory consumption is 640 meg, leaving plenty of space to run Notepad or perhaps Windows Performance Monitor).  With 2 gig it runs browsers, spreadsheets and word processors without complaint, but:

A NSW education department spokesperson, in response to complaints from students that their free netbooks don’t have the performance to run Photoshop, said

“Slow performance has not been highlighted as a major issue with the laptops … As with all computers, after time they can slow down. The department regularly upgrades the versions of software and performs a tidy up to ensure smooth running of the devices. This helps avoid slow boot and operating times.”

A. Why are these kids whining about free computers?
B. What the hell do school kids need Photoshop for?
C. Why would the passing of time cause a computer to slow down?
D. How does upgrading software versions improve boot times or even operating times?

Maybe the “tidy up” is the important bit.

Mac boot menu recommendations?

Hey there Mac geeks: a question.

I’ve got BootCamp running on my Mac Pro, and can get the menu for OSX vs Windows… but only if I remember to hold down the Alt key while booting.

Mac boot menu

What’s the best way to get this to appear (with a timeout, preferably) automatically?

It doesn’t look like BootCamp will do it.

Two alternative boot menus appear to be

rEFIt

and rEFInd

Any recommendations, or other suggestions?

(To clarify: I want to keep OSX as the default, but I want the computer to prompt — without having to hold down the Alt key at a specific time — to visibly allow the user to override it. Like Windows does with its boot menu when you have multiple operating systems installed.)

Update: Via Twitter, one vote for rEDInd, and a bunch of unhelpful comments asking me why I’d want to boot a Mac into Windows :-/