Order of the Bath

Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

Walled garden

12 Oct 2007 12:56 by Rick

This idea being promoted by MAAWG looks like it could be an effective way of limiting spam at source, and, as the members are high powered, it could actually get implemented.

The problem is that a large proportion of spam and associated phishing, viruses and other attacks are sent, not from huge malicious systems in a far off place, but many thousands of small home systems each adding their little bit to the flood and under common malicious control. They were infected by a previous attack and then join in themselves—these are called zombie systems and are collectively known as a bot-net.

The principle of this proposal is for ISP’s to identify customers on their own networks who are infected. Nothing new there except that they currently don’t do it because of the administrative overhead it would trigger. The difference is that once identified, the customer would have all their internet traffic automatically routed to a sanitised area called the Walled Garden within the local domain and that all browser requests result in a link to an internal site which provides education and disinfection tools. Until the customer systems are cleaned no traffic is permitted out onto the wider internet. Think of it as a quarantine with a pharmacy on hand for self treatment. The reasoning is that the majority of customers with infected systems are unaware of it and wouldn’t know what to do if they were told. This way they don’t have a choice.

There will still be some admin overhead—in calls to the help desk—and it would need to start easy to minimise false positive alarms, but it is probably the only way to force these infected zombie systems off the network.

As I said, there are some heavyweight people on this working group, AOL, AT&T, France Telecom (Orange) but not my ISP. But when(if?) the momentum gets under way, no ISP is going to be able to ignore it and stay in business.

Posted in email, Security, Technical | Comments Off on Walled garden

Green snake oil

9 Oct 2007 11:26 by Rick

With the growing interest in ecological living, there are a few companies selling Electric Power Savers now. Actually EPS stands for Efficient Power Systems (web site doesn’t work well in Firefox—actually not very well in IE either), a trade mark of the company of the same name that makes them.

These devices purport to save power. They are plugged into any socket in your house (i.e. in parallel with your appliences not series) and claim that they can reduce your house power consumption by 10–20% by “a combination of filtration and correction techniques to improve the efficiency of various appliances and circuits.”

Well I say that a device plugged into one socket in your house cannot affect the consumption at a different socket any more than you can affect the electricity usage of your neighbour. The best it can do is act as a surge/spike suppressor by absorbing them and even then its effectiveness will depend on the electrical distance from other devices; on a different ring, for instance, will reduce its effectiveness.

Their FAQ points out that people with accurate usage meters have noticed that it is consuming some power—I am not surprised.

Think before you buy.

Update: Croydon Trading Standards are aware of the scam. See right at the bottom of this link.

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on Green snake oil

Magnanimous Home Server

22 Sep 2007 08:17 by Rick

Windows Home Server?
Windows Home Server looks like it might be an interesting product. More interesting than Microsoft imagine perhaps as that definitely looks like a white Apple Macbook that they guy is using on the sofa! I got the picture and story from IStartedSomething. The Question is which is the original? Who has retouched the picture? Even so, it could be a Macbook Pro.
Windows Home Server

Posted in Mac, Miscellaneous, Windows | Comments Off on Magnanimous Home Server

The advert blocking debate

14 Sep 2007 11:25 by Rick

We all know that some web sites contain adverts and we know that some people don’t like them. Some people don’t like them so much that they block them. If you use Firefox then there is a very popular extension called AdBlock Plus. But now the site owners are beginning to fight back. They claim that the existence of the web sites and, in many cases, their livelihood depends on the revenue from the adverts and that, if you are not prepared to view the ads then they are not willing to show you the pages. They have developed a piece of code so that if you visit one of their pages with AdBlock Plus enabled then you will be redirected to a page of explanation.

Originally they blocked Firefox altogether but fortunately they have backed off from that. One argument is that the original AdBlock had this capability built in but now it is a war of the coders. This is a war that could get quite heated. Personally I don’t use AdBlock, my brain filters out unwanted stuff naturally, though I do stop animated GIFs and Flash because I find them irritating.

Posted in Browsers, Technical | 1 Comment »

Microsoft Stealth Patches

09:12 by Rick

It seems that Microsoft has been engaging in a little underhand patching. People are reporting that changes are being made even when they have automatic updates turned off. There is apparently nothing to worry about, they are perfectly good patches, but the deceit is troubling. To see if you have been hit, check the version of \windows\system32\cdm.dll (use right click – properties – version). A pre-patch version should be 7.0.6000.374. If you have been stealth patched then it will be 7.0.6000.381. There is a little discussion about it on the Microsoft Forums but nothing official yet. The only justification I can think of is that, as this is a patch to Windows Update itself, there may be no other way it can be done, but even that doesn’t excuse the silence.

Update: Microsoft have explained what is going on and it is just as I thought, but I still maintain that if they can detect and action that an update is required then they can just as easily tell you about it so you can make an informed decision.

Posted in Technical, Windows | Comments Off on Microsoft Stealth Patches

Distorted, Choppy Sound

3 Sep 2007 19:56 by Rick

All of a sudden, my PC had started to distort the sound of playback of anything, even the internal Windows “bonks.” Especially it would no longer allow me to play one piece of music off my network drive whilst ripping another, but any activity, especially disk activity caused the music to take a back seat only getting attention in the gaps. Awful! There may have been some impact on the overall performance as well.

The solution was totally unexpected but made a little sense in hind-sight. Some time earlier I had trouble writing a CD-ROM creating a coaster. It seems that in the process of all the errors, Windows in its wisdom, had downgraded my IDE controller which contained both the writer and the hard drive.

This can be confirmed by looking at Right Click “My Computer” / Hardware / Device Manager; then expand “IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers” and Right Click “Primary IDE Channel” selecting Properties. The Advanced Settings tab would show Content Transfer Mode = PIO mode (which is wrong).

To Fix it you need to uninstall the driver. Do this by closing the properties and Right Clicking “Primary IDE Channel” and select Uninstall. Do this for all of them if there is more than one. It will ask for a system restart. When you log back in you will notice various “Found New Hardware” slugs come up—for DVD/CD Drive, Hard Drive and the IDE channel itself. It will then ask for another reboot. This time if you go through the check again the Content Transfer Mode should be “Ultra DMA Mode 5” (or perhaps other numbers) and it should all be wonderful again.

Posted in Hi-Fi & Music, Technical, Windows | 2 Comments »

Renault Laguna Radio Controls

6 Aug 2007 08:56 by Rick

This is referring to the model installed in the 2001 Renault Laguna II but may apply to other models as well. If you have lost the handbook, as we have, some of the radio controls are a bit obscure and difficult to find by chance. I have borrowed someone else’s book and here are those instructions.

I have covered setting the security code elsewhere (item 6).

Mute/Pause

Pull both remote volume controls toward you at the same time. Repeat to come out of it.

Tone/Balance Controls

Press the Quaver button. You will then get a selection of options which are controlled by < and > or the remote scroll wheel to change between options and + and – or the remote volume toggles to change their values. The options are BASS, TREBLE, BALANCE and FADER (front to back relative volume). The rear speakers have to be activated in Expert mode for the latter to work.

Tuner Preset

To retain a station on one of the 6 quick buttons, first find it by other means. Then when it is playing, press and hold the desired number button until it beeps.

Tuner List

To change the selection of stations in the list press and hold the Tuner button until it beeps. The search takes some time but they will be stored in alphabetical order of RDS name.

Traffic announcements

The book says you can press the “i” button again to revert back to the main station early but this is not easy to do while driving. I have found it is easier to scroll forward and back quickly on the remote which has the same effect. I wish I know how to change the volume but the book doesn’t mention it.

News announcements

This is a facility rather like the traffic announcement facility but I don’t think it is supported by any UK stations. To enable it, press and hold the “i” button until it beeps. Switch it off the same way.

CD Random Play

To enable this, when the CD is loaded, press and hold the “1” button until the display shows RD.

Expert Mode

In order to invoke Expert Mode, press and hold the SRC button until it goes beep. You now have a series of options you can change in a similar way to the tone controls (above).

AF (ON/OFF) controls the alternative frequency system which searches for a better frequency for the same station if reception becomes poor. Often good for national stations but not so good if reception is generally poor or for local ones.
SPEED (0-5) controls the increase in volume as you increase speed to compensate for road noise. The higher the number, the more pronounced it becomes.
LOUD (ON/OFF) a strange American invention which boosts the bass and treble at low volumes.
TUNER (AUT/MAN) setting Manual switches OFF the station seek function in Tuner Manual mode which keeps scanning until a strong enough signal is found. Instead it moves 100KHz for each click.
REAR (ON/OFF) controls the back speakers.
LIST (MAN/DYN) I’m not sure what this does.

Press SRC again to leave this mode.

Factory Reset

Not something you are likely to need unless you ship the car to another continent. You need the SECURITY CODE to do this! To engage it, switch the radio off, hold down the 2 and 5 buttons and whilst holding them, switch it back on again. You now have a 2 minute wait while it beeps at you then, eventually, it will ask for the security code.

After that is entered, it will ask for the continent. The choice is America, Japan, Asia, Arabia and Other. The reason for this is they use different AM and FM bands. Select the right one with the scroll wheel and then press the button on the underside of the remote (nearest your lap).

The next question is CURVE (0-5) and sets the frequency response to suit the car. The values are 0 (Off), 2 (Clio), 3 (Mégane), 4 (Laguna), 5 (Safrane). I haven’t experimented to see what the effect is. Again press the underside button to move on.

Finally there is REAR (ON/OFF) which is asking about the rear speakers again. I think this relates more to whether they are installed at all rather then if you want them on. If you want to temporally disable them, use expert mode above. Press the underside button for the last time and the radio will be fully operational again.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Motoring | 19 Comments »

Media Players (4) Troubleshooting

2 Aug 2007 08:52 by Rick

The way Audio Visual playback works on a PC is that your player software of choice looks at that the file and decides what format it is from a 4 character code in the headers. This will tell it what codecs are required (they are separate for video and audio). It will then read the data from the file and pass it to the relevant codec. This will decode and expand the data stream and pass it back to the player software for display. The decoder parts of the codec have standard algorithms so, assuming they have been coded correctly, it doesn’t matter which one you use.

The best known codecs types are

MPEG-1—used on Video CDs.
MPEG-2—used on DVD and SVCD.
MPEG-4—used on HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Sorenson3—used by Apple QuickTime videos.
WMV—Windows Media Video sponsored by Microsoft.
Realvideo—now used mostly for streaming video.

but there are subdivisions such as mp42 and mpg4 which are both MPEG-4 codecs.

The best known audio codecs are

mp3—the generic and (probably) public domain codec.
WMA—Windows Media Audio which compliments the Microsoft video codec.

Some codecs do other things like the splitter which separate the audio from the video content. There are also surround sound decoders, subtitle extractors, language separators for multilingual files, chroma-key generators and digital signal processors for sound and picture manipulation. Even Audio and Video hardware drivers are considered as codecs by some applications.

Codecs come as installable packages, often in bundles, and are stored in C:\WINDOWS\system32 as .dll or .drv files.

How to find out what you need

AVI Codec Analyser tells you what you have installed and what you need to play any particular file but I can’t relate the two and it doesn’t seem to recognise QuickTime at all.

GSpot is popular doesn’t seem to recognise many for me.

MediaInfo gives similar information in a much more readable format (with many options) and supports QuickTime.

Finding missing codecs

If you find you need a missing codec, the best way is to search for them by name. Many will be found in the K-Lite package from codecguide.com

Posted in ChurchTech, Technical, Windows | Comments Off on Media Players (4) Troubleshooting

Security tip

25 Jul 2007 09:34 by Rick

Here is a suggestion to reduce the risk of credit card fraud.

On the back of your card is a three digit number which is not in the electronic information, either the mag. stripe or the chip. It is only used in online and telephone transactions.

Make a note of this number elsewhere and then erase it from the card—I have scratched mine with a pen-knife and then blacked it over with a pen. It is not easy to completely erase it as it is often indented into the plastic but that doesn’t matter. The aim is to make it difficult to read by cashiers and waiters when they handle the card. A favourite trick is to memorise this number together with the main number easily obtainable from the till and use it in online transactions before you get home.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Security | 1 Comment »

robtex Swiss Army Knife Internet Tool

08:48 by Rick

This is a nifty little gadget; it tells you all you ever wanted to know about your own connection to the internet (or any other I/P address specified)