Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Replacement lithium ions

Now that I have realized how useful the wiki could be for storing notes, I have decided to buy a new battery for the iBook. Less than one hour of unplugged time does not mesh well with several seminars or lectures a day.

Having a searchable, durable database of notes is worth the $160 cost of the battery. Also, since I will have two, I can continue to abuse the old battery by recklessly depleting it a third or the way, then charging it again.

Unfortunately, there is no chance of me actually getting it before this Friday’s climate conference in Reading.

[Update: 11 October 2006] I have cancelled the web order for the battery, as it seems like I wouldn’t actually get it until mid-November. I expect Apple is backed up on battery orders because of the Sony fiasco. I will just buy a battery in a shop, either in Oxford or London.

[Update: 31 October 2006] After 214 cycles, the battery seems to have suffered a critical failure. Now, even when apparently 3/4 full it will sometimes fail completely, causing the iBook to abruptly turn off. This is not a calibration issue; I have tried re-calibrating the meter several times.

Thankfully, I will be able to buy a new one in London in eight days.

[Update: 13 October 2008] My original iBook battery has now failed completely. It cannot run the computer for even a fraction of a second, the LED charge display on the bottom of the battery doesn’t work, and the computer often cannot detect that the battery is present.

Protecting your computer

Beaumont Street, Oxford

At least once or twice a month, someone who I know endures a computational disaster. This could be anything from a glass of wine spilled on a laptop to some kind of complex SQL database problem. In the spirit of Bruce Schneier, I thought I would offer some simple suggestions that anyone should be able to employ.

The most important thing is simply this: if it is important, back it up. Burn it to a CD, put it on a flash memory stick, email it to yourself or to a friend. The last thing you want is to have your laptop hard drive fail when it contains the only copy of the project you’ve spent the last month working on.

Now, for a quick list of tips. These are geared towards university students, not those with access to sensitive information or large amounts of money:

  1. Do not trust anything you see online. If you get an email from ‘PayPal’ or your bank, assume it is from someone trying to defraud you. It probably is. Likewise, just because a website looks reputable, do not give it any sensitive information. This includes passwords you use for things like your bank.
  2. Never address email messages to dozens of friends. Lots of viruses search through your computer for email addresses to sell to spammers or use for attacks. If anyone in that fifty person party invitation gets a virus, it could cause problems for all the rest. If you want to send emails to many people, use the Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) feature that exists in almost all email programs and web based email systems.
  3. If you run Windows, you must run a virus scanner. All the time. Without exception. If you run a Mac, run one in order to be sure you don’t pass along viruses to your friends. Both Oxford and UBC offer free copies of Sophos Antivirus. Install it and keep it updated.
  4. Run a spyware and adware scanner like AdAware often. If you are not doing advanced things with your computer, be proactive and use something like Spyware Blaster. (Note, some of the patches it installs can cause problems in rare circumstances.)
  5. No matter what operating system you run, make sure to apply security updates as soon as they come out. An unpatched Windows XP home machine is basically a sitting duck as soon as it is connected to the internet. See this BBC article.
  6. Only install software you really need. Lots of free software is riddled with spyware and adware that may not be removed when you uninstall it. Especially bad for this are some file-sharing programs. If you do any kind of file sharing, the importance of having a virus scanner becomes imperative.
  7. Never use secret questions. If you are forced to, fill the box with a long string of random letters and numbers. If you cannot remember your passwords, write them down and guard them like hundred dollar bills.
  8. For your web browser, use Firefox. Safari is fine, but you should never use Internet Explorer. If a website forces you to (especially something like a bank), complain.
  9. If there is something you really want to keep secret, either keep it on a device not connected to any network or encrypt it strongly. A user-friendly option for the latter is PGP. Whether it is some kind of classified research source or a photo of yourself you never want to see on the cover of the Daily Mail (once you are Prime Minister), it is best to encrypt it.
  10. Avoid buying compact discs that include Digital Rights Management (DRM). Many of the systems that are used to prevent copying can be easily hijacked by those with malicious ends. See one of my earlier posts on this.
  11. If you have a laptop, especially in Oxford or another high theft area, insure it. They can be stolen in a minute, either by breaking a window, picking a lock, or distracting you in a coffee shop. Aren’t you glad you made a backup of everything crucial before that happened?
  12. If your internet connection is on all the time (broadband), turn your computer off when you aren’t using it.

Basically, there are three big kinds of risks out there. The first is data loss. This should be prevented through frequent backups and being vigilant against viruses. The second is data theft. Anyone determined can break into your computer and steal anything on there: whether it is a Mac or a PC. That is true for everything from your local police force to a clever fourteen year old. Some of the suggestions above help limit that risk, especially the ones about security updates and turning off your computer when it is not in use. The third risk is physical loss or destruction of hardware. That is where caution and insurance play their part.

If everyone followed more or less this set of protocols, I would get fewer panicked emails about hard drives clicking and computers booting to the infamous Blue Screen of Death.

[Update: 6 January 2007] The recent GMail bug has had me thinking about GMail security. Here are a few questions people using GMail might want to ask themselves:

  1. If I search for “credit card” while logged in, do any emails come up that contain a valid credit card belonging to me or to someone else? I only ask because that is just about the first thing that someone malicious who gets into your account will look for. “Account number” and similar queries are also worth thinking about.
  2. Can someone who gets the password to my Facebook account, or some other account on a trivial site, use it to get into my GMail account?
  3. Have I changed the password to my GMail account in the last few weeks or months?

If the answer to any of those is ‘yes,’ I would recommend taking some precautionary action.

Oxford from above

Wadham College, Oxford MCR bop

As a recent comment proves, there is at least one thing Microsoft does better than Google: display aerial views of Oxford.

Compare Google Maps, centred on Wadham College, with the Windows Live equivalent: enormously superior.

Here, you can see:

Those pointed out, I should return to the overly loud MCR freshers party, and stop worrying about my ongoing student loan appeal dialogue. People should feel encouraged to list more nice Oxford locations in the comments (with links to Live Local photos).

Seeking new Oxford bloggers

Oxford is positively laden with newly arriving students. At least some of them must be bloggers. If you are among them, please let a comment with a link back to your site (if you want it added to my listing of Oxford blogs). Likewise, if anyone has found such a fresher blog, please leave a comment that links back to it.

I will not link blogs immediately. Rather, I will wait to see that they:

  1. have at least some real content
  2. have been around for at least a few weeks

Otherwise, maintaining the list would take far too long, and too many items in it would be without much value.

All Oxford bloggers should remember that the fourth OxBloggers gathering is happening on Wednesday of 4th week, November 1st.

PS. Making a link in a blog comment is easy. Just use the following format, replacing the square brackets with pointy ones (the ones that look like this shape ^ turned on either side):

[a href=”http://www.thesiteyouarelinking.com”]the text you want for the link[/a]

That will make a string of blue text that says: “the text you want for the link.” When clicked, it will take the browser to www.thesiteyouarelinking.com. Every bit of the formatting is important, including the quotation marks, so be careful.

On being an inept and reluctant webmaster

A website I am managing (not this one) is proving exceptionally frustrating. When I disabled the ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) editor in WordPress, I did so because its name was a filthy lie. In truth, what you code, and check, and then check again in every other browser you care to support is what you get. Well, the content management system (CMS) for the other site it like the the WYSIWYG editor writ large: nothing you do actually shows on the site in the way it showed in the editor. Like with the WordPress editor, hundreds of useless tags get added in opening and closing pairs. What’ s more, the CMS has added many layers of complexity to what it, in essence, a very simple site. The only way I have been able to edit tables in one part of the site has been the grab the HTML, edit it using jEdit, then paste it back into the site. This is clearly not the kind of thing you should have to do when you are running an elaborate CMS.

The simplicity of the content, versus the complexity of the management, is tempting me to copy the whole site over to a new CMS that is more comprehensible. Right now, we are using a system called Mambo. In many ways, it is a lot like WordPress. It uses an SQL database to store content, then displays it on dynamically generated pages. I am pretty sure WordPress could actually handle everything this website does, though having it look like a blog would not be acceptable.

Does anybody know of a free CMS that can be hosted using Apache and MySQL that might be easier to work with than Mambo?

Fourth Oxford bloggers’ gathering proposed

Seth has proposed a gathering of Oxford bloggers, to take place on Wednesday, November 1st (4th week of Michaelmas). 8:00pm has been our normal starting time. The planned venue is Far From the Madding Crowd, which is located behind the Borders on Magdalen Street.

Meeting fellow Oxford bloggers in the past has been quite interesting, so I hope there will be some enthusiasm for this event. Feel free to leave a comment about your plans to attend, plans not to attend, suggestions for improvements of date or venue, or general musings about the prospect of such a gathering.

[Update: 12:15am] Seth has a post about this online as well.

First impressions of Tiger

Installation, performance, and headline features

Installing Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) was a breeze – certainly the only time I have been surprised by the ease of installing a major OS upgrade on top of an existing installation. Because of the simultaneity of my RAM upgrade and the installation of Tiger, I can’t discuss the performance effect of the new OS. In aggregate, the iBook runs like a whole new machine. While it used to creak and complain when running just Fetch and iPhoto, it now runs Firefox, iTunes, iPhoto, Photoshop, TextEdit, and Fetch without any trouble. Indeed, 321 megs of RAM are still inactive with that collection, as a Dashboard widget informs me (along with weather forecasts for Oxford, and the all-important Canada-England exchange rate).

Another widget (pearLyrics, suggested by Jessica) is adding lyrics to my iTunes tracks as they are played, though it is oddly myopic when it comes to absurdly popular songs not released in the last ten years (most songs by Pink Floyd and The Beatles seem to stump it). This is a particularly useful function for me, as I am prone to either ignore lyrics entirely, focusing on the tone of a song, or spectacularly misinterpret them. I will leave the specific examples to my friends, for use in mocking me at parties.

Spotlight hasn’t proved terribly useful to me yet, mostly because I already have all my information sorted for easy location. That is not too unusual, however. All advanced search tools – from Google to Oxford’s OLIS – take time to become familiar enough to be really beneficial. Next time I am digging around for a particular file not viewed in months, it may prove its worth.

I have not used Automator yet, but I eventually want to create a workflow that takes an image file from iPhoto, opens it in Photoshop, resizes it to either 1024 pixels across for horizontal shots or 768 from top to bottom for vertical ones, lets me adjust the levels, lets me apply an unsharp mask, then creates a 320 pixel across the long axis thumbnail version, and uploads both versions to my server using Fetch. Ideally, it would then create an appropriate block of code to paste into WordPress, but this is all a project for a less hectic time.

Newly usable software

One of the reasons I decided to upgrade to Tiger was the desire to use the free application WriteRoom. The essence of simplicity, it is just a black screen onto which you type. Unlike almost all Mac applications, it can be made to take up the whole screen. There is no formatting – though there is optional spell-checking – and the simplicity seems to contribute to my ability to concentrate on the topic at hand. At a stroke, it becomes more like writing a letter than writing an email, which is clearly a valuable transition in a world where enough attention is rarely paid to written expression.

As soon as I can get my Airport card to work in passive mode with packet injection capabilities, the new version of KisMAC seems likely to be quite useful. It is already rather better than the standard Mac OS WiFi interface, in terms of detecting networks and revealing their characteristics.

Less obvious improvements

Another unexpectedly good feature of Mac OS 10.4 is the Grapher utility, which does both two and three dimensional graphing in a useful and attractive way. I may not have enormously much cause to use a graphing calculator these days, but it can be good to play around in an attempt to remember some fraction of what once I knew about trigonometric functions and calculus.

A few welcome improvements have also been made to Safari, though I have yet to open iCal (I use Google Calendar, though iCal would be grabbing the data from there and copying it to my iPod, if my iPod wasn’t broken again), Mail (I use Entourage and GMail), or Address Book (same). The improved PDF functions built into every Print dialog definitely look useful for anyone who does any sort of document publishing or collaboration.

PS. Unrelated to Tiger, but Apple-related: If you call Apple about your broken iPod using a scratchy enough Skype connection, they will call you back at their expense. Since spending time on hold at 30p a minute cell phone fees is among the most tooth-grinding of human experiences, this is good to know.