Author Archives: daniel

Windows permissions

In an effort to secure my home computers, I have been setting up accounts for my kids on both of them. Very easy. They get to play around with their favourite screensavers and wallpaper settings and so on. And I’m making them regular “users”, not “power users”, so they can’t “accidentally” install anything they find on the Web into the Windows directory or Program Files. (The school computers are riddled with stuff found from some super-dooper smilies and “mini games” web sites).

It’s times like these that you begin to understand why it’s so handy to have the Documents And Settings directories and the Registry, which have areas writable by all users. And you also begin to wonder why some software writers (including Microsoft) ignore them.

Example 1: Midtown Madness 2 (which my son Jeremy loves) needs write access to its own directory, for storing player data and some other guff. Easily fixed, but WHY?

Example 2: the DVD player software that came with one of the computers obviously wants to do something in one of the verboten directories and gracefully crashes and burns when it’s not run as Administrator. Haven’t had time to sort out why, exactly, yet. Must upgrade to PowerDVD — I wonder if it does that.

This is pretty basic stuff. Software authors really should know better.

More briefs

“You people should be ashamed of yourself! I did not ask to have 3 pop ups come across my screen when I visit you. I do not visit singles sites, and I don’t want to add 4 inches to my penis. As a matter of fact, I don’t use any of the services that pop up on my screen. I think it is disgusting that you money hungry bastards have infringed on my computer for your own selfish gain. From this moment on, I am boycotting you, and I am advising EVERYONE I know to do the same thing. Down with you and your pop up ads.” — User quoted by Jakob Nielsen (who it turns out probably had spyware on his machine. Umm, the user that is, not Jakob.)

This sounds pretty cool: Do you regularly rebuild your PC? This site has a guide to creating the ultimate Windows XP installation disk, with all your favourite applications, patches, settings and hacks built-in. (via David).

I used to wonder why the WinAPI GetTickCount() call always gave back a value that was a multiple of 55ms. Now I know why.

MS hits blogging. The blogosphere hits MS for its limitations. Oh well, that’s classic MSN… they do consumer products, not power tools. The whole censorship thing seems a bit drastic though.

These friendly freebie web hosters (Boss factor: risque, and note the URL) have a page where they expose people who abuse the facilities.

Quickies

Sick of that stupid “Open With” offering to find you a web service? Me too.

Oh great: MPs will be not only allowed, but funded to send SMS spam.

Most musos say the Net has increased incomes for their work, inspite of P2P sharing and piracy.

More on EA’s exploitation of programmers from the spouse of an EA employee. (via Bleeblog). Jeez. Should we started boycotting EA’s games?!

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” — Emo Philips.

Winhelp vs HTMLHelp

Popup helpI know the move from the ol’ Winhelp to HTML Help was meant to be a good thing (and at the time made my life easier, as I could re-use HTML formatted text more easily), but the loss of the very handy “What Is?” help originally trumpeted in Win95 is a shame.

Nowadays if you click the question mark on Word 2003’s options screen, for instance, it just chucks you onto a help page which covers the entire dialog. Doesn’t even open the bit that talks about the tab you were on. They really should have ensured that all the functionality of Winhelp 4 (that fine granularity of context-senstivity) was available in HTMLHelp. (Is it? Did the Word 2003 people just get lazy?)

In fact, I reckon what they should have done was improve the help development tools, but leave the underlying technology alone. Winhelp4 worked well for users, but its authoring was a real pain. That’s why tools like RoboHelp won sales. If MS could have come up with a way of easily developing your help in HTML, but having it compile into Winhelp4, they would have been onto a winner. In the days before everyone had IE, it would have got around the issues with poor Win95 users having to install HTMLHelp (and thus, IE 3+), and suffering the performance hit of having to load up the browser just to look at the help.

Of course, at the time MS would have been trying to entrench IE’s hold on every desktop. Which I guess explains why they did it their way.

Lycos vs spammers

Lycos, remember them? I think they might have been my search engine of choice around 1997, somewhere between Infoseek and AltaVista, way before young upstarts like LookSmart and Google arrived on the scene.

Well according to the Reg (via AndyN), Lycos are behind a new screensaver designed to launch DDOS attacks on spammers! Well okay, not to completely shut spam servers down, but to slow them down markedly.

Hmm. I hate spam as much as the next man, but I’m not sure about this. Could do nasty things to your local traffic (watch out if you pay by the Mb when you’re over your limit). You wouldn’t want to be trying to use bits of the Innanet close by to the spammers, and you sure as hell wouldn’t want to get yourself falsely identified as running a spam server. (Hey, if I can be identified as running a hacker/phreaking journal, anything can happen).

And of course, way for Lycos to come under fire by the spammers, who have apparently already hacked the page with a message saying “Yes, attacking spammers is wrong, you know this, you shouldn’t be doing it. Your ip address and request have been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action.”

This could be war. (Lycos Europe deny their server was hacked, that the spammers rigged it so people get a different one.)

Nintendo DS

Dunno if it’s common knowledge in all territories yet, but Nintendo is launching a new handheld, the Nintendo DS (I assume it stands for Dual Screen, ‘cos it’s got one) in some parts of the world this Christmas. No doubt it’ll reach those of us in AU in due course. Apart from beating the forthcoming Sony PlayStation Portable to the punch, it also appears to have limited (single player only) Gameboy Advance compatibility, meaning a big catalogue of older games already available, and an upgrade path for GBA users.

So, now may not be the time to go buy a GBA…

Podcasting – the next big thing?

I had a listen to the new G’Day World podcast yesterday, and most enjoyable it was too. The whole podcasting thing is an interesting development, something that could probably only take off properly now that IPods (etc), broadband and blogs have all hit the mainstream.

Back in ancient pre-history I did try something similar. To my surprise it’s still online (those archive.org people are geniuses). It didn’t last long… I could claim it was due to no broadband, no cruisy compressible-but-reasonable-quality MP3 format and no portable players, but principally I suspect it’s because the presentation and content were rather less than compelling.

I’d love to say I’d give it another go, but I probably don’t have time in the forseeable future, nor the inclination to say anything particularly interesting. But the concept is exciting, and I’ll be digging around for some good ones to listen to. It may inspire me to buy a portable MP3 player or an iPaq yet.

What will happen in the long term? Will this kill radio? (Some people have already abandoned their car radios in favour of listening to PodCasts on the drive to work). Or will existing media find a way to co-exist, as newspapers have with the web?

Hmmm. Personal video cameras have already got the power to get events not covered by the mainstream media onto the evening news. How long until video publishing hits the web in a big way?

WTF bounce department

Weirdarse email bounce today…

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at byron.aussiehosts.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<gipbexd@yahoo.com>:
67.28.114.36 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (gipbexd@yahoo.com) [0] - mta193.mail.dcn.yahoo.com

<gipbexd@yahoo.com>:
64.156.215.8 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (gipbexd@yahoo.com) [0] - mta283.mail.scd.yahoo.com

<gipbexd@yahoo.com>:
64.157.4.78 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (gipbexd@yahoo.com) [0] - mta149.mail.sc5.yahoo.com

<gipbexd@yahoo.com>:
64.156.215.8 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (gipbexd@yahoo.com) [0] - mta314.mail.scd.yahoo.com

<gipbexd@yahoo.com>:
67.28.113.11 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (gipbexd@yahoo.com) [0] - mta190.mail.re2.yahoo.com

Why is this so weird? Well because neither myself nor the recipient are on yahoo.com, no way did I address the mail to “gipbexd”, and thirdly, the recipient told me she received four copies of the mail anyway.

I should add that this was sent via Squirrelmail webmail, so it’s not like my Outlook got a virus…

Wi-erd.

SysRq

Ever wondered what the SysRq key does? Turns out it’s a kind of convoluted programmable key that hardcore programmers can commandeer. From the sounds of it’s it’s just as “programmable” and useful as the old function keys were on the Commodore 64 and Vic-20… eg not very much at all.

There’s also a less geeky explanation from the Straight Dope people, which goes through some of the other lesser-used keys too, including the mysterious Scroll Lock, which does have a modern use, at least in Excel, and Break, which when pressed with Ctrl will amongst other things stop execution in the VB IDE or batch files in DOS the command prompt.

Me, I wish the Insert key could be abolished. I don’t think I know of a more annoying toggle.