Owner: IT Werkz Sometimes URL:http://www.crunchysoftware.wordpress.com Join Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 07:00:38 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: The joys of booting software around the park before letting the hapless user have a look at it Site statistics:Click here
Vista DRM And Security Now 2007-01-19 15:10:25 For three consecutive Security Now podcasts Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson have been going on about the DRM in Vista
and how its been beefed up a helluva lot to protect Hollywoods High Definition DVD content. Seems that all you have to do is think about pirating a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray disc and activation codes start getting set to null, or deactivated. It all sounds a bit horrible but from what I can gather it’ll only affect the playback of DVD’s on the PC. And who wants to watch a film on their PC, let alone start trying to copy HD-DVD’s, anyway?
On the latest Security Now Gibson was actually reading from the license and going into the ramifications of all of this stuff. Of course licenses always sounds terrible. Can’t help thinking that those two have got themselves in a bit of a lather about all of this.
Lets face it the PC is a copiers dream. Want a copy of the new Scissor Sisters album, here you go, with scanned covers. You wanna free copy of Dreaweaver. No pr
Make Love Like A Porn Star 2007-01-16 14:22:36 I have a laptop I use for ‘experimenting’ with. As I have no essential data on there I can web about to my hearts content. And I mean some dodgy content here.
Thought I’d see if I could get some serial numbers and activation codes, ahem, from some dodgy sites. In the past I have had some success with these trawls. Not the other night though. Hell. Tried loads of them and none of them worked though AVG anti virus trapped about 10 virus’s which I was grateful for but some spyware - Spy Sheriff - did manage to get itself loaded. I’m not that bothered by these horrid little things as I have a recovery disk so that within 10 minutes I can be back to where I was before any kind of infection.
The AVG anti virus trapped something called secure32.dll so I consigned that to a bin somewhere but that file was used by the Spy Sheriff spyware that did get loaded. Heaven knows what it would have done. When I next started Internet Explorer 7 I got an error message tha
Finding Outlook's Mailbox And Address Book 2007-01-15 10:37:22 Got most of my applications working again with the one glaring exception of Outlook
. Did a search for the outlook.pst file and couldn’t find it. Did a google search for the problem and it turned out to be buried in a hidden folder called ‘local settings’. The full path for this is documents and settings’user name’local settingsmicrosoftoutlook where ‘user name’ is your login name. The mailbox file at this location was actually for the username that was relevant to the old XP setup. Therefore I copied this file to the same path but for the new XP setups username.
Having noted the path I opened Outlook, clicked on File, Open and then Outlook Data File and I was able to browse to the path with the outlook.pst file. OK’d that. All of the email was then displayed and accessible.
Now where is the contacts file? This is the address book. Just did a google on that and it appears to be in documents and settings’user name’appl Read more:Address
, Address Book
, Mailbox
Does The iPhone Do Anymore Than A Treo 650 2007-01-11 14:43:31 No I don’t think it does. In fact I think it does less. It certainly hasn’t got GPS on it. It doesn’t even have an SD card slot, no MMS and not even 3G, which the Treo also doesn’t have. But what it does have is a killer interface. And it is extremely desirable. I’m already thinking what lengths to go to to get one. That doesn’t mean to say that I’ll fly to the US when its launched in June. But when its released in Europe later in the year, and if its not on my network would I consider switching networks. You betcha.
Its great how the 4 major functions are a tap away at the bottom of the screen - phone, mail, web, iPod. Sort of concentrates the mind on the required functionality. Now compare that to the Treo and just about all other mobiles which have all of that stuff, but its buried.
There were numerous iPhone
mock ups I saw and while a lot looked pretty good, when you compare them with the final product they were hopeless.Â
The iPhone was o
Apple Unveils Revolutionary iPhone 2007-01-10 10:40:21 By LC Angell
Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Tuesday, January 9, 2007
News Category: iPhone
Following literally years of speculation and rumors, Apple
CEO Steve Jobs today introduced the iPhone, a sleek all-in-one device combining a mobile phone, widescreen iPod, and internet communicator. The iPhone boasts a 3.5-inch widescreen display and runs a version of Apple's Mac OS X operating system with an innovative new user interface for using just a finger to control the device on-screen.
It comes in two capacities—4GB and 8GB—and includes support for quad-band GSM, EDGE, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR wireless technologies. The iPhone also sports a built-in 2 megapixel camera and will work with Macs or PCs. Apple's Jobs confirmed that the exclusive carrier for the iPhone will be Cingular.
Jobs said the phone is 11.6mm thin—thinner than any smartphone available, including the Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack. The iPhone has built-in sensors—an accelerometer, a proximit Read more:Revolutionary
Full Metal Screw Up 2007-01-09 12:14:47 Continued rebuilding the pc last night. Heck, I seem to have done nothing but firefight the darn thing for the last 6 months.Internet Explorer v6 was a mess. Loaded the first page ok and then subsequent pages just didn’t work. Tried installing v7 from a magazine CD and that just flashed up on screen for a nanosecond then went back to bed. Not a lot of use. Uninstalled it and reverted to v6. Hmm… I thought it wasn’t possible to uninstall IE. Anyway v6 was still a mess. Uninstalled that from Add/Remove Windows Components or whatever its called. Mind you it did show a size of zero k. Reinstalled from Windows Components and again its zero k size. No evidence of any IE on my system at that time. From Start hit the link for Windows Update and IE started went to the update site and found 18 updates. What gives with this mess of an o/s.
Overnight started iTunes and got it to start to sync with the iPod. Of course the iPod threw a spanner in the works coz it thought it sync&# Read more:Metal
, Screw
Recovery And A New Installation Of Windows 2007-01-08 11:44:04 Have been having trouble writing DVD’s for a while and also doing the packet writing thing so that I could drag and drop files onto formatted CD and DVD discs, they would then behave like a hard drive. Checked the system log and there were error messages for the aspi32.sys service which could not be started as the file could not be found. That name rang a bell. Google’d it and it appears to have something to do with CD’s and lord knows what else. Also it appeared to be a prime target for viruses. Anyway, if I haven’t got the file then I should be ok there.
Ran the PC’s recovery option, F10 at boot. This recovery option is from a hidden partition on the first drive and shows up as ‘non-dos’ in fdisk. This should take the machine back to its state when I got it 2 years ago without destroying any data. Have run this before and it worked ok. Left it to thrash around for about 20 minutes and finally it reboots and prompts me to login which I d Read more:Installation
, Recovery
, Windows
Steve Gibson Reckons Linux Wine Is 100% Windows Compatible 2007-01-04 13:05:14 I’m talking about the Linux
Wine which is an ‘ Open Source implementation of the Windows
API running on Linux or Unix’. Wine lets you run Windows applications on Linux or Unix.
Recently on a ‘Security Now’ podcast I listened to SteveGibson
said that, having found the exact same bugs in Wine that also exist in Windows, that Wine was bug for bug 100% compatible with Windows. In other words every single problem issue that exists in Windows has been coded the same in Wine.
This has got to be nonsense. Why would anybody deliberately replicate errors if you can get your code to run a bit better than the original. I know that there may be a case for replicating some known errors where they are so well known that other applications run around them so that their application runs correctly. In this case it would be necessary for Wine to do the same.
If the Wine developers deliberately coded every single bug that they know exists in Windows then those guys woul
Windows Defender Service Disabled By Microsoft 2007-01-03 14:20:10
I have a laptop that hadn’t been rebooted for months. A while back I downloaded and installed Windows
 Defender
which didn’t crash anything. In fact I don’t know if it actually does anything at all. Its supposed to be a spyware scanner but I don’t remember it popping up and telling me that it had trapped anything.
Since installing Defender I have also downloaded and installed numerous other Windows updates. Remember I haven’t powered off this sucker in months. Well I finally did the other day just to see what would happen.
It rebooted ok but displayed a message stating that an application had switched off the Defender service and suggested that I restart the pc, presumably so that the service would be automatically started again. Before rebooting I checked the services and the Defender status was Disabled
and I couldn’t re-enable it or start it. Hmmm…
Then I rebooted. Checked the Defender service and again it was Disabled as before. And no I Read more:Microsoft
, Service
, Windows Defender
Skype To Start Charging For Calls? 2006-12-21 11:25:15
I can’t believe how long Skype
has been giving away their VOIP for free. Its great for everybody. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world get to make calls for diddley-squat, both national and international.
Got a feeling as soon as there are lots of people dependent on it that that will change. Either a monthly charge, though that might be hard for them to collect on or versions of the Skype client that will work for a year for $30. Not too much for most people knowing that they won’t have a landline bill due of a couple of times that figure each quarter.
And all of a sudden eBay, who own Skype, suddenly generate revenues of $30 times 200m, and thats $6 followed by a shed full of zeroes. How much did eBay pay for Skype? Whatever it was it kinda makes sense.
Quote of the day
‘I have a theory that the truth is never told in the nine-to-five hours’ Hunter S. Thompson (1939-2005)
Read more:Charging
, Start
Call Of Duty 3 Problem Solved, Get A PS/2 2006-12-18 20:05:05 I was actually considering buying a PS/2 just to play COD 3 which would have made it a very expensive game. Someone I know has a PS/2 he no longer uses as he has an Xbox 360, and leant it to me also with COD 2: The Big Red One. Excellent. Dashed out this lunchtime to get COD 3.
Dashed home to play 3 and I was hopeless at it. Just like when I first played COD 2. Not helped by my first use of the controller instead of the keyboard. The game starts off quite dark and predictably vicious. When I’d had enough of my ineptitude at 3 I had a go at The Big red One, which I was also useless at.
I think it was a couple of weeks before I got used to COD 2.
Update 20/12/06: still useless but marginally less so. Can now remove some games from the PC and hope the uninstall process doesn’t trash the registry on the way out.Â
Quote of the day
‘I phoned my dad to tell him I had stopped smoking. He called me a quitter’ Steve Pearl
Read more:Problem
TV's Running Operating Systems 2006-12-12 10:49:30 Just heard on The Tech Guy podcast that Leo Laporte has bought a Pioneer 50″ Plasma HD TV and it runs on Linux. What? What the heck is an operating system doing on a tv. Depending on an operating system to run a TV sounds a bit foolhardy. These kinds of operating systems are rarely finished and not often polished enough to run a PC for longer than about 6 months before corrupting itself. Heck, what chance is their of giving the poor old user a chance of watching a TV program for its duration before some sloppy bit of Linux code invokes itself and switches to the Discovery Stamp Collecting channel. As for Linux staying stable for the expected lifespan of a TV, say 10 years, whoa, all bets are off pal.
Within a couple of years there is bound to be a combination of operating system events that will stop the TV from starting or the Linux equivalent of the blue screen of death. It will no longer be switching on the tv it will be booting the tv, which will be a bit touch and g Read more:Operating
, Systems
Installing A PS/2 Mouse Turns Off The Firewall, Huh! 2006-12-09 18:04:27
I’ve been having trouble with my optical wireless mouse for a while and have swapped it over a few times for some very temporary fixes. There’s nothing worse than a pointer that’s got a life of its own.  So I bought a good old PS/2 ball mouse and a wired keyboard.
When I disconnected the infra-red receiver, for the wireless mouse and keyboard, I found a second receiver hidden away behind the monitor which was probably messing up the first receiver. So I also unplugged the second receiver as well.
I plugged in the PS/2 mouse, rebooted the PC and on restart XP found the PS/2 mouse and suggested rebooting again, which I did. When it restarted the Microsoft Firewall
had been switched off.Â
So was it the removal of the two infra-red receivers which caused the firewall to be switched off? No. The firewall was still switched on after the first reboot.
Therefore the culprit was XP updating itself when it recognised the PS/2 mouse and used one of its own drivers. Read more:Mouse
XHTML & CSS And A Dummies Guide To RSS 2006-12-06 08:55:34
Been reading the ‘Syndicating Web Sites With RSS Feeds For Dummies
’ book and have read the first 30 pages and I still don’t know what this guy is on about. As soon as I read the term RSS or Feed my eyes glaze over.
I’ve even got a ‘Subscribe’ control on this blog page which I think has got something to do with RSS and Feeds. I can’t remember how I got it up there or even whether it works. Knowledge lost in the mists of time no doubt.
Better just wade through the book, get to understand it and then pull this embarrassing blog entry. Sheesh.
Started reading a book on creating web pages last night - HTML, XHTML
& CSS by Elizabeth Castro - and pretty good it is too. Haven’t touched this stuff since I used Frontpage about 10 years ago so this is going to be fun. If I can understand this book then using Dreamweaver 8 should be easy to use.
Whatever happened to those Nero problems I had. Nothing, still can’t get the packet writ Read more:Guide
Treo 650 Befuddled 2006-12-05 11:55:44
Treo ground to a halt yesterday. I noticed that the battery thought it was being recharged when not connected. The touch screen was very confused. Tapping on anything resulted in that control not working but some other functionality being invoked. Removed the battery a couple of times to no avail. Did some kind of warm reset which appeared to sort the problem. Why did it get so upset in the first place?
Shame that happened as it was the first time I have had any problem with the Treo which I do think is a really great smartphone. The ability to get email by polling every 30 minutes is very cool. I now understand why people get so attached to their Blackberry’s.
Quote of the day
‘I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up’ Tom Lehrer (1928-)
Someone's Test Strategy 2006-11-30 14:32:43 Somebodies written a test strategy document and one of the reviewers keeps asking me questions about it. So I had a quick peek at it (why wasn’t I asked to review it if I’m such a know-all, because they know I’d probably rip it to shreds). Its seems to be a mash-up of a document written by a highly-paid by the day Test Consultant, who almost certainly Google’d for its contents and a document that roughly reflects most of the work processes they do now.
And it ain’t pretty.
Looks like we have a whole slew of new ‘experts’ now that the company want to do what they think of as more structured testing. I think the experts have been webbing about all over some testing sites and consequently their testing nomenclature is all a bit confused. I did write recently how they were all confused about the types of testing and who does what. Now they are very confused by titles like ‘test pack’ and other testing titles.
In fact they were very, ve Read more:Strategy
Incremental Creep 2006-11-29 15:36:28
I like that title though it doesn’t really have anything to do with this entry, nor the above picture, apart from my progress with using InCD from Nero. Will be able to have another go at using the darn thing later after the AVG and XP nonsense of the last few days. It does seem that if anything is installed like Nero 7 and Dreamweaver 8, which I have installed recently, there are ramifications sooner or later.After the install of those two apps when I was in Windows Explorer and fired up Chkdsk and checked the ‘Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors’ checkbox before running it. For some reason it could not run right away but it did schedule Chkdsk to being run on next boot up. Which it did and failed. Rebooted and it found problems. Got to the end of its mashing of the data and after the next boot it took 20 minutes to start. Ran SFC which tidied up Windows but not well enough as I ended up running XP Setup which did sort things, mashing AVG on the way out Read more:Creep
, Incremental
Call Of Duty 3 Due For The PC This Friday 2006-11-29 14:05:53 Source: uk.rottentomatoes.com
(Friday
: I’ve just checked with Game and its not coming out on the PC. Did I put up this post just to get traffic, no I’d rather the game had come out, rats. Just as well I never stuck this up on Digg)Â
And the review headlines look great:
“The game is still is at the forefront of World War II action shooters in every regard.” Gamezone Online
“I will be playing this game for a LONG LONG time.” Next Level Gaming
“It attempts to look, sound, feel, and play better than Call of Duty 2, and on most accounts it succeeds.” Gamepro
“While the action in Call of Duty 3 feels a bit stale (but really, can anyone make a totally original WWII shooter?), this is another great entry in an excellent series.” Teamxbox
“From start to finish, Call of Duty 3 is an intense experience and a great game.” Gamespot
And a bit less good:
“Even for those who wind up enjoying the online component, Call of Du
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