Fuddland

Entries concerning the world of computing.

This category is a subcategory of Science.

This is the ill thought-out and quietly-added “feature” of Windows XP SP2 which has caused Imogen and Matt, amongst I’m sure many others, to lose valuable work:

No operating system should ever assume it’s safe to reboot without the express permission of the user. If the updates are critical to the security of the system, by all means temporarily disable any internet connections, but don’t reboot it in the middle of the night, there’s no way it can know it’s not losing valuable work in the process. These points aside, five minutes is a ridiculously short warning time — that’s time enough to be off making a cup of tea or talking on the phone away from the computer. If they wanted to force a reboot, twenty-four hours notice would be much more apt.

To prevent this happening, change your auto-update settings to one of the middle options: it can either download any updates then wait for permission to install, or just notify the user of their existance.

Don’t you just love it when you upgrade your video card drivers and you find they’ve added a whole new feature?

• Change the clock.

According to the system clock on this laptop, it’s almost half past six in the evening. Except that it’s not, where I am, it’s almost half past twelve in the afternoon. Understandably, the Department sets up most people to have Limited Accounts when they borrow a laptop — they don’t want people installing any old software, either on purpose or by accident on visiting a dodgy website whilst bored and alone in their motel room after a long day’s conferencing. [This is not the case with myself, I hasten to add: I am neither bored nor alone, and am staying somewhere a damn sight nicer than a motel room. Nor am I at a conference, for that matter.]

But preventing a user from changing the clock? How can I break anything by setting it to a different timezone?

The progress bar — some of you, particularly those who spend all bloody day messing around with Matlab, may call it the “waitbar” — is a wonderful thing. It puts one’s mind at rest; it says, “Hold on for a second, I’m just doing something, but don’t fret: so long as I keep inching towards 100%, you can rest assured I’ve not hung your precious machine. Tell you what, why don’t you have a nice cup of tea? Go on, I’ll just keep on letting you know how much further I have left to go.”

Previously, when I set my code running, I had no idea how long it would take. Well, I could guess, based on certain parameters I’d set: minutes, maybe hours, possibly days. But would “hours” turn out to be “several days” written another way? Would “days” be “weeks times seven”? I was never really sure, and it usually meant I’d stop the code before it had finished its run, change a couple of things to try and make it run a bit quicker but with less accuracy, then restart it all over again — and I had no idea if I’d stopped it three seconds before it was due to spit out the end result.

Then I discovered I could make Matlab display a progress bar, that this was incredibly simple to do, and all was joyous in the land of Fudd. Not just because now I can judge how long my code is going to take, based on the speed of the various bars that I’ve added at various stages, but also it makes the code appear to run faster: I can quite happily sit and watch the bars creep up to the big one-oh-oh and not go slightly mad wondering if I should stop everything and change that 0.05 to 0.04.

Of course, my progress bars live in a strange fantasy world far-removed from those we come across in everyday life: my progress bars always reach 100%; they increase fairly uniformly, except for one which accelerates, but that’s because the code I wrote does fewer and fewer calculations the farther it gets through its run. The progress bars we see during our average days, however, are progress bars gone bad.

They tease us: they shoot up to 95% in ten seconds, then take ten minutes to do the last 5%; or they get distracted by something on the telly and give up completely on the task in hand, sitting firmly at 45% until you crack and hit the “Cancel” button; sometimes they pretend to be finished, displaying a lovely filled-in block of one-hundred-percentness, but refuse to relinquish control of your computer. “What is it you have left to do?” you plead. “Oh, nothing,” the bar whistles innocently, “I just like being here.”

Not so my progress bars: they are Plato’s Progress Bars, plucked straight from the world of ideas. Now if only the rest of my code would find its way down from there…

There’s nothing like a freshly reformatted hard disc — free from months of needless clutter and with a new policy of reinstalling software only when you want to use it for the first time rather than on the off-chance you might need to convert all those MP3s to MIDI files or write a LaTeX document in Cyrillic using four different text editors — to really make you appreciate how nifty your PC really is, despite being a few years old now.

The only downside is when you get so distracted downloading all the patches and updates or locating those registration codes that disappeared into your email archives several months ago, that you forget you’ve left a rather large pot of water boiling on the hob [to remove the chlorine before cooling and topping up the fishtank], and only remember when you notice the mirror seems to be dripping in condensation and you realise that’s a bit odd for quite a warm May afternoon.

sharing a pc — or specifically, the mouse — between two people is fine if they are both of the same handedness, but in my house there is a problem because i am left-handed and my housemate is right-handed. the setup is such that the cord does not reach over to the right-hand side of the keyboard, and whilst we can both use the other hand to some degree, it’s much nicer to be able to have things orientated naturally.

it’s to this kind of situation that cordless mice are ideally suited. in fact, i have one, but it’s got a tiny flaw: it’s rubbish. the batteries it takes make it too heavy to use freely — the ball gets stuck very frequently no matter what surface you use it on; the range of the receiver is laughable — any further than a foot or so away and you might as well be trying to throw a tissue to somebody in a hurricane for all the good it does; if you are within range, the batteries run out within a couple of days, and no matter how many packs you buy, you’ll always find you have no spares precisely when all the shops are shut.

so i decided i should take the plunge and splash out on the all-singing cordless, optical, rechargeable logitech mouse i’d heard about from phil. except, of course, it’s ergonomically designed for right-handed people only. look at those handy configurable buttons on the left-hand side — yes, i’m sure they’re easy to press if i remember to dislocate my little finger every time i sit down at the computer.

i’ve searched extensively but this is about the only cordless, optical, rechargeable mouse i can find — the next option is to buy a cordless, optical mouse and a pack of suitable rechargeable batteries, but this doesn’t have the convenience of charging every time the mouse is stowed away for a few hours. it’s annoying because, seriously, who actually uses those extra buttons? left click, right click, middle click sometimes, scrollwheel — that’s all i need. mac users get by with just one button, surely eight is overkill?

visit supermarket giant tesco.com using internet explorer or mozilla, and you’re greeted with a homepage brimming with offers, links, and so many options it’s hard to know where to start.

however, go to the same address using the very latest official release of opera, and you’re initially told that you’ve been redirected to a section ‘specially designed to work with new internet technology — such as an internet tv box, a pocket pc or with any computer with a screen resolution less than 800 x 600 pixels.’ yes, thanks tesco for providing this special site to those that need it. however, i’m using opera on an ordinary pc and a monitor with a 1280 x 1024 resolution, so why can’t i see the proper pages?

their ‘special’ site looks like this:

very business-like, ‘come on, do you know what you want? then just buy it! no time for idle browsing’. some people may actually prefer this, but it’s hardly conducive to extravagant impulse purchases or repeat visits.

i’m getting quite fed up with being forced to use a specific browser for certain sites — tesco.com can be fooled into thinking opera is internet explorer by virtue of the ‘browser identification’ option [simply pressing f12 allows opera to convince some sites into thinking it is a number of other browsers], but tesco is not the only one who can’t be bothered to design their sites to work with anything but the most popular browsers. if i want to use powergen’s site to submit a meter reading or look at my latest bill, attempting to use opera throws up this error page:

helpfully they say you can try opera [in an ‘if you must’ sort of way], but only version 7.20 is allowed. that’s version 7.20 as in the ‘only in the beta testing stage and not officially available’ version 7.20.

similarly, egg’s incredibly handy money manager — allowing me to see the balances of all my different accounts held with various banks aggregated onto one page — is internet explorer only. i’m sure they used to say they were intending to implement it for other browsers eventually, but this seems to have been reneged.

you’d think these gripes and niggles would be enough to make me switch to a different browser, had i not tried them all and decided opera is by far the best one out there. here’s why.

Read the rest of “in defence of opera”…

an interesting article ‘digging for googleholes’ describes a couple of flaws in google’s pagerank system.

probably the most pertinant to bloggers is the second point, ‘skewed synonyms’, whereby a word takes on a new meaning, as far as google is concerned — the example given being the word ‘apple’, where the first fifty-or-so hits are nothing to do with the fruit.

as an example of how bloggers can skew things, searching for the radiohead album ‘hail to the thief’ currently results in the amazon page for that album as the top hit, with the official radiohead page some way down. part of the reason for this is the number of blog posts linking to amazon when talking about that album, although i suspect amazon would have made its page as likely as possible to come up top anyway. i must try and remember to link to less commercial pages such as the gracenote cddb or, for movies, the imdb.

i don’t think it’s all entirely the fault of google’s algorithms though — the onus is on the searcher to help google as much as they can. the article mentions the difficulty of finding a product review for a dvd player — adding the word ‘review’ in the search term rather than using just the name of the product would refine the results. google is still the top search engine by a long way, it just needs a little help every now and then.

for the conspiracy theorists: the most interesting thing about the article is where it’s posted, given that msn are making a concerted effort to improve their own search page.

lately i’ve been getting a new breed of spam — dialogue boxes that pop up of their own accord, no matter what programmes are running at the time, announcing anything from girls and boys that want to meet me to software that can block these very boxes from appearing in the first place [for a small fee, of course].

at first i thought it might be kazaalite’s doing — was it not so lite after all? or maybe it was vnc allowing this new traffic in?

after one too many popups this morning, i got annoyed enough to try and stop them — and discovered that it’s the windows operating system itself which allows these things to appear, via a component called ‘messenger service’, which is nothing to do with msn messenger.

the service exists to allow network administrators to send instant messages to the pcs on the network — for example, to tell them to shut down their pc or something like that. it’s existed since windows nt, but apparently it’s only recently that spammers have started using it by systematically sweeping ip ranges and firing off messages to any that are using this messenger service.

a quick fix is to disable the messenger service — this shouldn’t affect home users too much, but there is a possibility that printers and anti-virus software use the service to pop-up legitimately useful information, so isn’t the ideal solution.

i suppose we can’t really blame microsoft, since this service does serve a useful purpose and it’s just being abused. they recommend checking some specific firewall settings, and sure enough, for some reason, mine was allowing these messages through [not no more though].

to make doubly sure things were secure, i went to grc’s shields up! page and ran the two tests that probe for vulnerabilities, and it reported that my pc is once again invisible to the outside world. i hope.

want to know what’s outrageous? [yes, i think even more outrageous than a pink feather boa.] a seventy-five pound charge for moving house and transferring your freeserve broadband account to the new location. and then having to sign up for another full year. gits. i’m never moving.

having unsuccessfully tried both mozilla and [my current browser of choice] opera on my university pc [problems with caching and profile size made both of them unusable] i was almost resigned to using ie — until i found slimbrowser. it’s…

Read the rest of “the best of bad worlds”…