Computer Tips -Tech Info

I’ve just updated my WordPress install on 2 sites up to the new release version 2.7 which is now two days old or so. I quickly took a look at the sites and saw that the global translator plugin wasn’t working. (It was giving 404 errors, or…. “nothing found for es” for example.) After a quick look at the FAQ, I just navigated to the settings page for the plugin and scrolled to update options (without really making any other changes) and all is back to normal.

I expect to ripple the new version of wordpress around to my other sites over the next week or two. Right now there is not a pressing need to upgrade (2.7 is a new feature release, not necessarily security update.)

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This looks NICE… The new Light for Life flashlight which uses an ultracapacitor instead of batteries. Because of the ultracapacitor it takes 90 seconds to charge up. It uses LED lights and can run for 90 minutes on that 90 second charge. I see some uses that this wouldn’t be appropriate for, but many that it would be great for…. (If they could sell a handcrank adapter or some portable charge method that could be excellent.) It comes with a mounting bracket, belt ring and DC charger. (The number of charge/recharge cycles of a lithium ion or himh battery would pale in comparison to the ultracapacitor.)

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In the wake of a huge patch Tuesday, Microsoft has two new fires to be fighting. There are apparently “limited and targeted” attacks against a flaw with the Text converter component of Wordpad. Affected systems include Windows 2000 SP4, XP up to SP2, Server 2003 SP1 and 2. Vista is not affected Server 2008 is not affected, XP SP3 is not affected. Read on for more on this one (AND the Explorer 0-day)

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Microsoft had a mammoth patch Tuesday this month with 28 bug fixes (23 critical). (Computerworld article linked above. This is one of the largest update releases in five years (!) Those fixes were wrapped up in 8 updates for Internet Exporer, Office, Sharepoint, Windows media player and visual studio and Visual basic. (Oh and it looks like there are two more they SHOULD have fixed – reports of 0-days in the wild.)

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I LIKE stamping things with the date, whether it’s a status report email or filename. (Like say I’ve downloaded todays news in Spanish, it really seems to make sense to tag it as spanish_news_12_8_08.mp3 instead of just spanish_news.mp3 doesn’t it?)

Okay, so this is something I do in a lot of my shell scripts. Here’s some code to play with.

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If you don’t know what a netbook is, it’s this recent class of laptops that’s very small and portable, many with solid state drives and can be a nice small portable computing platform. These are not desktop replacements, but can certainly be used for some serious work (which puts them a step above a PDA or phone.)

Anyway, this site has a great comparator of the various models currently out from makers such as Acer,Dell, etc. It gives a breakdown of the features, pricing, etc. Very nice if you’re in the market for one of these great small portables.

Many of these ultra small portables run a variant of linux or they will use Windows on them for a windows xp laptop, vista though hasn’t been used on many of these due to it’s resource requirements.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC in it’s December meeting will be looking at the possibility of requiring the winner of the upcoming spectrum auction to use a portion of it’s spectrum to provide free internet access. They would require filtering although the idea is that adults could get unfiltered access with verification. Large wireless networks (as you can imagine) are against the idea, but I wonder if it REALLY is the threat to them that they think.

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The title says most all, the system would start to act as though it was powering up. The LED would come on for a second and the fans would start. The fans stayed on, but the LED went right back off and the system didn’t seem to POST, or show anything on the onboard video. This is a Gateway gt4022 with a 64 bit AMD processor and I think was Media Center edition of Windows XP. Anyway, I pulled the memory and CPU hoping to hear some sort of BIOS beep code, but no such luck. I pulled everything at one point with the exception of the power to the main board. It still gave the same symptoms. I tried another power supply just in case, same…. So, as I started to read online it seems that the motherboard in these Gateway gt4022’s may be a problem….

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Here are some notes from a recent spyware cleanup. The system came in and there were complaints that “Ron Ads by NetupBanner” kept coming up all the time as well as popups claiming that the dll c:\windows\system32\nolomipu.dll is not a valid windows image – mismn.exe bad image.

I ran malwarebytes antimalware and that cleaned out a LOT…

I installed the new version of AVG (8.0) – AVG 7.5 had been on the system (fairly up to date (within 2 days)) Webroot Spysweeper was installed, but the subscription was expired. Internet Explorer is the primary browser.

then I started looking at the invalid image errors – here are the notes:

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I had to find a twist like that headline above reading this article. Net Applications does a monthly survey across sites that receive 160 million visitors to gauge the “market share” of operating systems and web browsers. According to the November numbers, Microsoft Windows has no fallen below 90% market share, Mac is up to 8.87% and linux is around 0.83%. The growth rate for Mac is 7.43%, Linux growth rate is at 15.49% The iPhone is “only” growing at 12.12%

Of course, looking at numbers from one month to the next you can see variations caused by a number of factors that may or may not accurately reflect the situation. Are people surfing more from work this month for some reason? Maybe there is a weather related reason that causes more web traffic than last month/less/etc…. Still the trends are that Windows is shrinking and NON windows use is growing…

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