Posts filed under 'IT News'
Two of them are on my mind at the moment
Vodafone: They have conveniently broken the online “My Account” system, meaning that I am not able to alter my call diversion settings or view my credit balance online. At the moment I would like to divert all calls to Call Minder which will send me a text message with the phone number of anyone who tries to call me. I suppose that I could just turn off my phone, but I don’t really want to send everyone to voicemail.
Microsoft: I’m performing a clean installation of Windows Vista for a family member. The computer in question has a 3Com 3C905B network card. These cards were quite popular at one stage, and are still relatively common, however Microsoft have decided that they don’t need to include the driver for these network cards with Vista, and Vista also seems to be incapable of identifying the network card. Annoyingly, this meant that I had to boot to another Operating System in order to work out exactly what network card it is, then visit the 3Com website to download the drivers (first download on the linked page), copy them to a flash drive and then extract them on the computer in question.
After installing the drivers for this 3Com network card, I ran Windows Update, only to discover that a newer version of the driver is available from Windows Update. If Microsoft can go to the trouble of having a newer version of the driver on Windows Update than is available directly from 3Com, would it really have been so much trouble to use up a few of the bytes of the Vista DVD with the driver?
Oh, and the default volume setting of Creative sound drivers…yes, I want to be blasted out of the room by your maximum volume.
Samuel
December 8th, 2008 at 11:16pm
Last night when I went to open iTunes, I was greeted by a rather annoying error stating that iTunes could not be opened due to a “detected” problem with QuickTime. Apple recommend uninstalling QuickTime and then installing it again under these circumstances, but that sounds like a bit of a “we don’t know, but this might help” solution to me.
Considering that nothing had changed since I used iTunes about 24 hours before receiving the error, I figured that I would see if I could sort the problem out myself before resorting to a reinstallation. I remembered that a few hours before the error I started loading a large MP3 (Samuel’s Persiflage #8 to be precise) in Firefox, but cancelled it by closing the tab it was in when I realised that for one reason or another, Firefox was insisting on downloading the full file before letting the QuickTime plugin play it, which is a change from its previous behaviour of letting the QuickTime plugin play the file while it is downloading.
My thought was that, possibly, a QuickTime process was still active and was preventing iTunes from loading QuickTime properly. I couldn’t see any QuickTime processes in the Task Manager, so I tested the theory by launching QuickTime from the start menu…oddly this resulted in an installation wizard, which produced the following rather insightful message:
I somewhat nervously hit “OK” and watched the progress bar indicate that the setup routine was doing something, although I haven’t the faintest clue what it was doing as I wasn’t prompted with a Windows UAC “Are you sure that you want to grant this program permission to do stuff?” message, which indicates that no changes were made in the Windows or Program Files directories.
Once Setup finished, QuickTime loaded, and iTunes was able to work. It’s beyond me what that was all about, but at least I didn’t have to waste time going through Apple’s website to find the somewhat hidden standalone QuickTime installer.
Samuel
December 5th, 2008 at 09:56am
The more observant amongst you will have probably noticed that every time I post a poll, a stray “n” appears just above it. Annoyingly, it’s not possible for me to remove this without manually editing the database which runs this site.
As it turns out, it’s a bug (as I suspected) in the Democracy plugin which runs the polls. I just didn’t connect the dots between that and me upgrading this blog to WordPress version 2.5.x a while back.
In lieu of a patch from the developer, it looks like the fix is fairly straight-forward. I’ll try it out at some stage in the coming days and see how it goes.
Samuel
December 2nd, 2008 at 02:24pm
According to Firefox’s Australian dictionary, “unticking” is a misspelling which should be corrected to “anticking”, whilst “untciking” is “unthinking”.
It might have a valid point.
Samuel
November 24th, 2008 at 03:36pm
Because I just won’t get to them otherwise…
New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees solves the problem of incompetent ministers. Just sack them all and have a one man show.
Gmail Chat was always an effort to save the Google Talk client, and now finally the two can be considered equal: Gmail Chat has audio and video capabilities.
Got a spare $USD130 billion to give away each year? Good, because Barack Obama’s health plans could cost that much. And to think that political parties in this country bother to cost their promises before the election.
Using an “unsupported web browser” (or even an ever-so-slightly customised version of a supported web browser)? If so, Microsoft have introduced random bugs in to Hotmail for your convenience. That said, if you use Hotmail, you kind of deserve what you get.
Got a problem and the media won’t ignore it, but don’t feel like launching another inquiry? Kevin Rudd has the answer…declare war on it!
Samuel
November 14th, 2008 at 02:50am
Today: The Great Firewall of China comes to Australia
Tomorrow: Australia follows China’s lead and declares Internet Addiction a disorder
The next day: Kevin Rudd translates those “The Internets can be of harmful to healths” stickers from Mandarin to English…unfortunately needing to use the Google Translator because he doesn’t actually speak Mandarin.
Sometime next week: Internet access is outlawed simultaneously in Australia and China due to the “potential harmful effects of greenhouse gases emitted by routers and data centres”.
The next day: Cigarettes and alcohol are banned as well, the double standard was just too big too ignore.
It’s not entirely inconceivable is it? And surely both bans would work just as well as each other. We know that prohibition is always a wonderful success. I wonder what happened to the Internet being a crucial part of our economy? Wasn’t that one of Kevin Rudd’s pre-election mantras?
Samuel
November 12th, 2008 at 08:03am
Apparently the Internet contains pornography…
Teenagers and young children searching and downloading the latest tunes over the Internet are being exposed to pornographic images and websites.
The popular Internet tool LimeWire is at the centre of the pornography scare.
Searching for Britney Spears and even children shows The Wiggles and HI-5 return explicit images, and links to child porn websites.
That’s just a tad too selective…in truth, searching for anything on LimeWire is likely to produce results which aren’t what you’re searching for, and if you’re lucky you might find what you’re looking for as well.
But who came up with this astonishing revelation? The next paragraph of the article should clarify that:
Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, commander of the child protection and sex crimes squad, says police are seriously concerned about file-sharing programs like LimeWire and their capacity to expose children to inappropriate material.
“Police have previously received reports and conducted investigations into the receipt of this kind of material,” he told News Ltd.
Well, good luck Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, organisations with much more money to play with than you will ever see (the RIAA for one) have been doing their best to get rid of file sharing for many years.
For better or worse, where there is file sharing, there will be unsavoury content, this has been known for a very long time, so why it has managed to make the news today is beyond me. Surely Kevin Rudd has said something on his latest overseas trip…even if he was just ordering dinner, it would be more newsworthy than this tripe.
Update: news.com.au are claiming to have an exclusive on this story, and their article even links to the Limewire website. Does this mean that the folks at news.com.au want people to download Limewire and search for The Wiggles and HI-5, and then follow the yellow brick road to the content that the article whinges about?
While we’re at it, would somebody like to wake a sub-editor?
In April, ?? men were sentenced to jail in Queensland and the Northern Territory for also accessing child porn via LimeWire.
End Update
Samuel
August 20th, 2008 at 06:49am
As you would probably be aware by now, Google Street View was launched in Australia this morning, with pictures of many places across the nation now available as part of Google Maps.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, basically Google sent cars with cameras mounted on them around a large number of streets and how now made the pictures available in conjunction with their place on the map. It’s an interesting concept and good for a quick bit of research if you ever need to work out exactly what a place looks like before you get there…or maybe want to know what some of the nearby landmarks are.
I had a little play with it this morning and noticed, amongst other things:
I did briefly consider the possibility that Google’s project may nullify my plan for a photographic series after I finish the “Canberra’s Dams” series, where I was going to pick a random street in Canberra each week and take photos of it…but then I noticed that Google’s photos don’t come with a date attached, whereas mine would. Mine would also last longer than “until we decide to drive around again”, which means mine would have some lasting historical value. I think I’ll go ahead with my series anyway.
Samuel
August 5th, 2008 at 04:35pm
I don’t know if any of you remember PodZinger as it came and went from the public spotlight very very quickly a few years ago, but basically it was a semi-promising new search engine which aimed to automatically index and transcribe podcasts. If it worked, it would have been a good way to find information in what is otherwise an awful medium to search.
But of course, it was doomed from the beginning as anybody who has ever used voice recognition software would have known. To get a computer to recognise a voice with any amount of accuracy, you have to train it. Usually this involves two steps, the initial preset “read these sentences” training exercises where the computer gets to hear you say things that is asks you to say, and then the ongoing “no, I said “cat” not “hat”, the hat is not in the hat, the cat is in the hat…no, the cat is not in the cat either” intermittent corrections which also help the computer to learn how to understand your voice.
The reason we need to teach the computer how to do recognise an individual’s voice is that everyone has a slightly different voice and a slightly different speech pattern…and if humans who are predisposed to understanding the speech of other humans have difficulty understanding people with accents, what hope does an untrained computer have?
As far as I can tell, PodZinger had no form of quality control…the robot listened to the audio, produced a mangled transcript of it, and nobody bothered to check the accuracy of it. A system where corrections could be submitted by listeners could have worked better, but I don’t think PodZinger were ever interested in having masses of voice samples floating around in their system, nor do I think that having masses of voice samples from different people would have helped with individual transcriptions.
So, why am I babbling about an ultimately failed search engine of little-to-know consequence? Because they’re still around under a different name (EveryZing) doing much the same thing, albeit with expansions in to the more profitable and sane market of search engine optimisation, and expecting people to pay them for it. Maybe the transcription software is better today than it was in 2007, but I wouldn’t be willing to pay them in order to test the theory.
I noticed that they are still around on the weekend when I was wondering if they are still around and was shocked to find that they are. They also have all of their old archives…and if you search for my name, you can be informed about my Chinese communist leanings by their transcription robot.
It has transcribed the Feedback segment from Samuel’s Persiflage #13, specifically the section from 47 minutes and 58 seconds. According to their robot, in that segment I said:
can go to get sort of course if you concentrate back podcasted Samuel Gordon Stewart — Communists the email address or you can leave comments in the China nights or irritants Samuels who supplies were sought to
Maybe the robot’s ears are blocked, because when I listen to that segment, I hear:
feedback to get through and of course if you’ve got some feedback, podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com is the email address or you could uh leave the comments in the show notes or go to the samuel’s persiflage website and
That said, I have been (jokingly) accused of encoding secret messages in Samuel’s Persiflage…maybe they were on to something…I would have to be among the last people on Earth that anybody would consider as a possible communist, so I would have to be the perfect vessel for hiding and broadcasting such messages.
It leaves me pondering the question: “Why am I giving the conspiracy nuts something to work with?”
Samuel
June 30th, 2008 at 06:10am
A bounce message from a Japanese mail server
This is the Postfix program at host mfgw215.ocn.ad.jp.
I’m sorry to have to inform you that the message returned
below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.
For further assistance, please contact
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the message returned below.
The following sentences are Japanese.
このメールと共に返信されているメールは一つ以上の宛先に対
して配信できませんでした。
エラーメッセージの原因や対処法については下記のサイトで
ご案内しております。
http://www.ocn.ne.jp/0/faq/mail/errormail/
上記のサイトでも解決できない場合は、
へご連絡ください。
ご連絡の際には、この障害レポートを一緒にお送りください。
このメールに添付されているお客様の元のメールは削除しても
構いません。
Apart from the possibility that the person receiving the bounce message doesn’t have the Japanese character set installed and might see a string of gibberish in place of the Japanese characters (in which case they would have received all the information they needed from the English text) I can’t see any logical reason for including “The following sentences are Japanese.” in the message.
In case you’re wondering, Google’s automated translate and garble service believes that the Japanese text says:
Reply to this email with email has been the recipient of more than one pair
We were unable to deliver.
Error messages about the cause and deal with the following sites
Please show.
Http://www.ocn.ne.jp/0/faq/mail/errormail/
The site also does not solve the above case,
Please contact.
Please contact when the crash reports please send us together.
This provided in the e-mail your original email will also delete the
Fine.
Now, if they had written “The following text is intentionally nonsensical”, then I might have seen their point…at least it would rule out the possibility of a computer malfunction in favour of insane programmers.
Samuel
March 6th, 2008 at 04:21am
I have one minor gripe with Gmail, and that is that there is no obvious way to show only unread messages. The reason this annoys me is that over the course of a week I will skip many messages that I don’t need to read or know what I need to do with them, whilst reading others, which leaves an inbox with unread messages scattered over many pages…I then eventually get around to cleaning up the unread messages but have to spend far too long doing so.
The good news is that thanks to Ozzie, I have found out that, even though it’s not obvious or seemingly documented, it is possible to show only unread messages through the search function in Gmail by searching for:
is:unread
Even better, now that Gmail’s search produces usable URLs instead of long strings of gibberish, it’s possible to bookmark a link to the unread messages view:
http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/is%3Aunread
It should be possible to narrow the search to a particular place such as the inbox or a label with an extra argument or two. Of course you will have to be logged in to Gmail prior to clicking the link for it to work…now if only there was a way to save archaic searches in Gmail rather than having to bookmark them.
Samuel
February 22nd, 2008 at 08:43am
Anti-virus company Trend Micro are suing Barracuda Networks on the grounds that Barracuda are using ClamAV anti-virus on their spam and anti-virus gateway products, something Trend Micro claims breaches their patent on anti-virus software being used in SMTP and FTP gateways.
It’s a court matter so I won’t say much, except that if the claim is upheld, then Trend Micro will have a green light to sue many many companies and open source projects for the same thing.
The patent is, in my opinion, ridiculous, but it’s a patent none-the-less and it will be interesting to see the outcome of this court case. Regardless of the outcome, the ramifications will be felt.
Samuel
January 30th, 2008 at 05:03pm
A couple little bits of Technical news that caught my attention overnight.
Fairfax have becoming a network peering partner of PIPE Networks.
For many people in Australia this will reduce the number of hops to Fairfax websites, making them much faster to load and interact with. Sites included in this are The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, MyCareer.com.au and many other Fairfax Digital sites.
Interestingly MyTalk.com.au which they inherited from Southern Cross Broadcasting is not a part of the peering agreement, probably due to it seemingly being hosted somewhere in Adelaide and therefore not being part of the New South Wales agreement.
In other (probably more interesting) news, MySQL AB has been purchased by Sun Microsystems (even if the title of the article makes that less than clear). MySQL AB are the people responsible for the popular MySQL database, which is used as the backend for many a website including this one.
Sun Microsystems have a pretty good record of supporting open source software, and the people at MySQL AB seem pretty happy, so hopefully this will be a good thing.
Samuel
January 17th, 2008 at 09:07am
I’m not sure if it’s a case of “let’s make life difficult” or “here’s a hidden feature, let’s pick a random setting for it”, but Microsoft have done it again. From the people who decided that Windows Vista didn’t need the rather useful telnet client installed by default and that support for 32 bit .hlp files was unnecessary but 16 bit .hlp files needed to be supported, comes the decision that various older office files should be locked out in Office 2003 Service Pack 3.
I can almost see a use for this feature in corporate environments where ancient file formats might be disallowed for security reasons, but even then it doesn’t make much sense. Such ancient files would almost certainly be internally archived files, and on the rare occasion that such an ancient file would be sent in an infected state, any anti-virus program worth it’s installation should be able to detect an ancient exploit.
The ancient files can be unblocked with some registry editing but that is going to be a painful annoyance for a number of IT departments that will now be forced to research the problem and then apply the fix, not to mention the inconvenience for the people trying to use older files.
By default the blocked files are:
A bunch of Lotus and Quattro spreadsheet files
.dif and .slk spreadsheet and database files
PowerPoint files prior to PowerPoint 97
MS Word files prior to version 6.0
I can’t see how these file formats could be considered a security risk because they really aren’t. The only logic I can see here is that Microsoft have decided to discontinue support for these formats so that they don’t have to write code that makes it possible for each new version of Office to understand the growing number of outdated file formats. Rather than just dropping support they are blocking the formats to see how many people jump up and down about it, and if there aren’t enough people complaining then support for the formats will be dropped.
It really comes back to the argument for open standards. A lot of these older files are not open standards, especially the older MS Office formats, and if it only takes 15-20 years for Microsoft to decide that the formats are no longer worth supporting, then what hope do governments, or anybody else required to keep records for that matter, have of maintaining records if they are using proprietary formats which are common today, but gone in twenty years?
At least with open standards it is possible for third parties to create software capable of working with the files. Currently the best that can be done is reverse engineering the formats…a process which produces good results, but not perfect results…and if we want to maintain files for hundreds or thousands of years, we need perfect results.
I suppose the best I can hope for here is that either:
1. Blocking, with the option to unblock, is as far as Microsoft will take this, or
2. Once Microsoft officially kill support for ancient formats, they release the formats as open standards. Obviously they can only do this with formats they own the rights to (eg. not Lotus or Quattro), but it would be a step in the right direction.
Samuel
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:24pm
It could very well be a sign of where Telstra are headed, American telecommunications company AT&T plan to remove all their payphones over the course of the coming year.
AT&T will continue to provide wholesale payphone services, so other companies will be able to cash in on AT&T’s exit, but if it’s good enough for AT&T, then I do have to wonder what the future has in store for Telstra’s payphones.
Thankfully, for the moment at least, Telstra have to adhere to a minimum standard known as the Universal Services Obligation, although the more I look into it, the less confidence I have in the USO’s ability to make Telstra do anything, especially after the government department responsible for the USO, the Department of Broadband, Communications and The Digital Economy (who names these things?) wrote this (page 15):
As currently drafted, this regulatory framework is quite flexible, and commits Telstra to ‘all reasonable efforts’ to provide a payphone and gives it discretion in weighing up the relevant factors.
That document shows a decline in the number of payphones by nearly 25% between 2000/2001 and 2005/2006 (although the actual dates on that are ambiguous).
Telstra normally receive a bit of a public backlash whenever they announce the removal of payphones, so I would be surprised if they were as bold as AT&T in announcing a removal of all payphones in the next year, or in any timeframe…but when I consider that their propaganda website nowwearetalking.com.au has an entire section devoted to extolling the virtues of their payphone service, I just have to wonder what they are capable of.
The precedent has been set, I can only hope it is not followed.
Samuel
December 5th, 2007 at 11:35am
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