Posts by happygeek

Surely the place to be asking this is Facebook tech support?

Wireless is, without doubt, a really great thing. Apart from when it doesn't work that is. If you live in a big old house, for example, then getting your WiFi signal to extend through a few thick walls from one end of the place to the other is not always easy. And before you utter the magic words 'repeater hub' I throw back the 'not always easy' incantation in your direction. I know all about the fun you can have with a less than optimal wireless signal, especially if you throw a few kids and an Xbox into the equation: Xbox Live gaming and a whole bucketful of lag really do not mix. And I've not even mentioned media streaming yet.

What you need in such circumstances is a wired connection, but who wants to start drilling through walls or laying Cat5 cable around crawlspace? OK, the hardcore geeks can sit down, I was talking to everyone else! Actually, what you need is a wired connection that has the portability benefits of wireless but the stability, speed and reassurance of Ethernet. What you need is HomePlug networking. To cut a very long and complex story short, HomePlug networking uses some very clever technology to establish a fully wired network using your existing electrical wiring without the electrical 'noise' impacting upon the transfer of data. If you've not encountered HomePlug networking before it sounds almost too good to be true, but as soon as you've seen it …

Of course, now that Europe have won the Ryder Cup, can I just say what a wonderful game golf is and how I have always loved it so...

You know, actually telling people what you want rather than assuming they will be able to guess what a "device which have all the required things in it" is might have been a good idea.

That said, doing a bit of research yourself for a homework project rather than expecting others to hand it to you on a plate isn't a bad way to approach your education either...

DaniWeb went down yesterday for a short while. I reported this to Blud who immediately started investigating.

The slow response times would be associated with the recovery from that downtime I would imagine.

Anyone can play golf, but why would anyone want to? Good walk spoiled, and all that.

Now Rugby Union and Mixed Martial Arts, those are sports. I'm thinking of inventing a new sport which combines both, that would kick ass - literally.

One problem I have noticed with the Kindle 3 is that it can be a little temperamental when it comes to WiFi connectivity. A couple of times during the last week, when browsing the Kindle Store mainly, the WiFi connection has barfed, requiring a reboot.

OK, it is only a matter of holding the power switch for 15 seconds and then waiting another 30 seconds for the Kindle to come back to life with WiFi working again, but it's a minute that I could do without.

This has not happened when I am just reading books, nor has it happened enough to make me change my 9/10 rating of the device. Hopefully, Amazon will fix this with a firmware update before it becomes too problematical.

They already got wet yesterday, BADLY!!!

I always find it easier to predict stuff that has already happened.

Of course, one of the things that makes the new Kindle so great is the seamless integration with the Amazon Kindle bookstore for browsing, buying and downloading your new books. So the web access needs to be there, you just don't need to extend it out of the e-book experience arena and into the 'explore the web' one, in my never humble opinion.

It's certainly a lot easier than carrying a bookshop around with you. Believe me, if you saw the size of the beardy wargamer bloke who runs my local bookshop (yes, we still have such a thing here) you wouldn't want to carry him anywhere.

I predict they will all get wet. Very wet...

The Kindle is not your choice for web browsing, period.

The Kindle is not your choice for watching videos, period.

Seriously, why even consider such a thing? It's an e-book reader, and a blindingly good one, but nothing else.

I guess I should add that the Kindle is not your choice for listening to music either, despite the speakers on the back and the ability to play music. :)

The web browsing is a new 'experimental' addition to the Kindle, and to be honest can stay as such as far as I'm concerned: Kindle is cool as an e-book reader because it doesn't pretend to be anything else but one.

The iPad cannot cure the sunlight reading problem compared to the Kindle, it's a simple matter of display technologies - horses for courses really - and e-ink would be crap for all the myriad things the iPad is so good at. My point here being that the iPad makes for a pretty poor e-book reader, and one look at the new Kindle exposes all the reasons why.

It has been a long time coming, but the e-book reader had finally arrived. Oh, I appreciate that there have been many stabs at e-book hardware including the Nook and the efforts from Sony, not to mention the claims of iPad fans and Apple with that iBooks app and iTunes App Store integration. Oh, and not forgetting Amazon's own previous efforts with Kindles 1 and 2 of course. The trouble is, frankly, none of them have actually done the job well enough for me to take them seriously enough to consider replacing my paper book reading habit. Some have been too heavy, others strain the eyes too much or have text that disappears in sunlight, and that's before I even get onto the subject of buying e-books and loading them onto your device. Yet here I am, the author of more than twenty published books of the printed variety, a self-confessed bibliophile and now the owner of an Amazon Kindle 3.

The new Kindle has a lot going for it, from the 4GB of storage of which a little over 3GB is available to the user which equates to enough for storing some 3500 books, to the new e-ink 'pearl' display which is, quite simply, breathtaking. Not in a full colour, touch-screen swiping, video playing iPad kind of a way I grant you. But the Kindle has the advantage of not trying to be all things to all people, including an e-book reader, instead it concentrates …

We will look into it, thanks for the heads up guys.

Most spam continues to be drugs related, yet it is aimed at workers in the automotive industry. The United States, traditionally king of malware infected email, has dropped like a lead balloon to be overtaken by the UK. And workers prefer to download stuff on the move and get their sexual kicks in the office. Who said that security reports were boring? DaniWeb has been talking to Paul Wood, senior analyst at Symantec Hosted Services, about the implications of the newly published September 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence Report .

The report, published by September 21st, reveals that some 35 percent of workers using the MessageLabs Hosted Web Security Service will trigger a web filtering policy block away from the office rather than in the workplace. Interestingly, download category blocks are more than five times as likely to triggered by mobile workers than office-based ones, yet attempting to access sexually explicit content is more commonplace in the office than out of it. DaniWeb asked Paul Wood how businesses can protect themselves from the threat of staff trying to circumvent corporate policy when outside of the workplace. Here's what he told us:"You will never be able to completely lock down the use of the Internet within the workplace and you will never be able to stop the cyber gangs. Education with the workplace is key. Businesses need to educate employees on the risks from malware and how their behaviour affects this, also education about the various dangers …

And that was the German babe I was referring to earlier >;-)

The likes of Norton these days make much fuss about just how quick installing a security suite is, but you can forget all claims of being done in 60 seconds when it comes to Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security. Think less of speedy rocket-powered installations and more of slow and steady, with a certain degree of swimming through treacle wearing flippers thrown in. Having checked for any conflicting software (such as Norton) or even traces of such software left behind by other security suite uninstallation routines (hello Norton again) and then removing them, the Trend installer goes and fetches the latest updates before eventually getting on with the application installation itself. On our real world testing system the process took, including system restarts, a yawn-inducing 20 minutes from the get go to the got protected. So was it worth the wait?

There has definitely been a move in recent years to a less is more philosophy as far as the security software vendors are concerned, and that's most definitely a good thing. Many years ago now I attended a technical workshop hosted by Symantec at its Santa Monica base, and a senior firewall architect at the time was enthusiastic about what he referred to as 'the silent firewall' which essentially would perform all the blocking and filtering functions required to keep your computer secure, but without all the annoying 'you wanna let this do that' type prompts that were commonplace at the time. Trend Micro, …

You need to go and ask for help with that in the hardware forums, making sure you explain your problem in enough detail to enable our members to give you the advice you are after.

This forum is purely for saying hello and introducing yourself, not for getting help with your problems.

All the best in getting it sorted out...

According to the colophon the dog is a Newfoundland, 26-28 inches tall at the shoulder and weighing 100-150 pounds. O'Reilly always choose animals for the covers, and one assumes they went for a big powerful dog as the book is about developing big powerful applications. :)

How do you create a mission-critical website providing exceptional performance yet at the same time being flexible, reliable and scalable? That's the question that Kyle Loudon, a software developer and manager of a user interface development group at Yahoo!, sets out to provide the answers to in his book: Developing Large Web Applications.

Sub-titled 'producing code that can grow and thrive' Loudon has adopted a practical approach to developing large web applications that remain effective as they scale up in terms of features, functions and users. His past experiences, including developing a flight planning system that's used by airlines worldwide and teaching object-orienting programming at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have come together in these 279 pages. Not only in the obvious depth of knowledge displayed by the author, but perhaps most importantly in his ability to communicate this clearly and concisely. As Nate Koechley, Frontend Engineer and Designer at Yahoo!, so aptly puts it in his foreword "Build big by thinking small. Build new by thinking old. Manage scope. Boost signal and reduce noise. Resist breakage... these things are easy to rattle off, but it takes an author like Kyle, and a book like this, to make them practical and real".

A book like this, however, is not for beginners to web development languages and tools. If you don't already possess at least some degree of familiarity with the likes of CSS, HTML and JavaScript then you will, dear reader, soon get …

Thread now closed as it has become a spam trap

There should be a simple opt-out or unsubscribe link for digest emails in the emails themselves or even in the member profiles but I have yet to find one.

At the very bottom of the DaniWeb Digest there is the following:

"Click here to opt out of DaniWeb Digests, our monthly community newsletters. You can always opt back in, and change other membership options, by visiting your Member Control Panel."

One click and you are unsubscribed.

If the malware threat was going to make any significant impact upon people switching to Linux/MacOS then I suspect it would have done so by now, to be honest. People stick with what they know and what is easiest (and not just in usability terms but also purchasing, cost, marketing, software availability etc).

Malware takes many forms, it's not just down to 'allowing a popup to occur' and nothing in this news story suggest that it is. The truth is that every OS allows a user to click on a link that downloads something, and allows a user to then execute that downloaded something. Whether that executable can actually do any damage or not is another thing, and the G Data research would suggest that in 99.4 percent of cases only Windows users are at risk as the malware is coded to target them alone.

Yep, link clicking idiots are always going to be the weakest link in the security chain no matter what the OS.

Davey knows that :)

It might interest you to know that of the remaining 0.6 percent of new malware apps identified by the G Data - that is the ones not coded to seek out Windows users - they were looking for Unix/Linux and JavaScript targets. A big fat zero percent, as I understand it, were looking for Mac OS specifically, hence my reason for making that particular comparison in the piece.

Anyway, for the record, I'm a Windows user and don't have an expensive Mac OS machine here.

Have you ever thought about measuring the Internet in terms if malware per minute? Me neither, but someone has and it makes for uncomfortable reading if you are a Microsoft Windows user.

How fast is the Internet? It depends on the metric being used, of course, but one new report published this week has an interesting new take on this old question. How does four malware apps per minute grab you? According to German security vendor G Data , the number of new malware applications has already hit a record for the first half of the year with more than a million recorded in just six months alone.

The 1,017,208 malware programs represent an increase of 50 percent compared to the same period last year, and security experts are now confidently predicting that by the end of 2010 we will have witnessed more than two million of them. Of that million or so malwares, 99.4 percent was written to target the Windows Operating System. Breaking it down further, 42.6 percent were Trojans, with downloaders and droppers representing 20.3 percent. Backdoor malware code makes up just 12 percent of the total, while worms represented just 5.27 percent of the total.

"The current numbers are alarming. The malware industry has published nearly four new viruses per minute in the first half of the year" so says Eddy Willems, G Data’s Security Evangelist, who added that the attackers are mainly targeting …

You are not alone, it didn't immediately click here either. Oops :)

Everyone loves PHP these days it seems, and that includes the bad guys. So it should come as no surprise to learn that yet another remote access Trojan written using PHP has appeared. However, the fact that this particular bit of PHP backdoor code comes complete with a second, hidden, backdoor within it certainly was surprising to the security researcher who found it. DaniWeb has been talking to that researcher to find out more...

"Is there no honor among thieves anymore?" asks Andrew Brandt, the Lead Threat Analyst for security specialists Webroot, when disclosing the details of his PHP double backdoor discovery . It's a good question, albeit one that just begs an answer of 'was there ever?' to be fair. Being a threat analyst for a leading security vendor, Brandt spends a lot of time picking through exploit code. So it was not unusual for him to find himself examining the internal workings of a PHP remote access Trojan that loads into memory on a target computer when the victim strays upon the iframe which points to the PHP script sitting embedded in a web page. "The code is nicely appointed with such desirable features as the ability to execute shell commands on the host server, send a flood of data packets at another computer, and scan remote computers" Brandt reveals.

In fact, it's fairly standard bad guy stuff, albeit well written bad guy stuff. Until you start to dig a little deeper …

Erm. I surrender :)

Over to Dani for the answer to this one...

The staff writers are paid.

On the same day that UK Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has been explaining that Government sees "no justification for taxpayers' money being used to support research which is neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding" and that universities will be expected to "do more for less" an event has been showcasing the latest near-market products and technologies that have evolved from just such research.

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The 'Meerkats and Avatars' event held at the Hauser Forum and organized by St John's Innovation Centre, took place today and served as a great reminder that commercially viable science and technology innovation is most certainly not dead in the water. Of course, you would expect nothing less from Cambridge which has just been voted the number one university in the world , beating Harvard, Oxford and Yale.

Speaking at the event, Martin Graham, former Head of Markets at the London Stock Exchange proposed a new type of stock exchange that would increase liquidity into the market for growth businesses and help innovation drive society forward, arguing that "new products, services and technologies are key to economic recovery". Graham, founder of the CMX Capital Markets Exchange platform, admits is can be difficult for investors to identify early-stage businesses with real-world commercial potential and as a result more than half of those businesses getting short term 'Angel' support go under. "Short-term investment means that valuable time is spent chasing new sources of funding, rather than developing the business" he added.

David Gill, MD …

I honestly thought this was a device to give the writers some byline credits so they could use them to get real reporting jobs some day.

I guess I had better hand back my National Union of Journalists Press Card (held for 20 years now) and resign my post as Contributing Editor of PC Pro (biggest selling monthly print IT title in the UK, held for 15 years) not to mention give back the numerous journalism awards I have won over the years which happen to include one for security news reporting that was given for an investigative story that I broke right here on DaniWeb concerning the first virus to be found on a TomTom satnav device.

Seriously, you might not like the news coverage here but to insult the professionalism of the people writing them is juvenile in the extreme. :(

You are allowed to advertise in your sig, that's what it is for. The rule you refer to applies to post content, rather than sig content :)

What you are not allowed to do is just post rubbish which has nothing to do with the thread you are posting in, just to publicise your sig.

How about:

Do not mention, plug or refer to any product, service, or website you are affiliated with anywhere outside of those specific Business Exchange forums which are specifically designated for this purpose

Hi there, we treat external links as advertising/spam (specifically: "Do not mention, plug or refer to any product, service, or website you are affiliated with") but appreciate you were not intending to spam - hence we just edited the link out rather than deleting the message and issuing a warning/infraction.

Hope you enjoy your time with us, you'll probably want to start off by jumping into the networking forum.

Sadly, I think the correct answer is: know-nothing dumbwads who sincerely believe they know it all are commonplace on the Internet.

At least within a forum-based community such as ours you can politely point out the error of their ways and, fingers crossed, the wisdom of crowds will ultimately kick in to support you.

Finally, I would say a little patience goes a long way. I know, easier said than done, but keeping your dignity while all around you lose theirs is certainly a decent mantra. If you find yourself fighting a losing battle in a thread, there's nothing to stop you from quietly surrendering and moving on to one where the OP is prepared to listen to you and the signal to noise ratio is better.

I think the new Stig should be a woman, although the secrecy thing would be shot from the start as it's obviously only ever going to be the German bird who drove the van around the Nürburgring :)

A product review is just that AD, a review of a product written by a DaniWeb staff writer. Certainly not spam. :)

I will admit that I didn't stumble upon Steven Levy's classic tale of how the IT west was won, for want of a better phrase, until 1993 when it was republished some 10 years after the original book but with the addition of a handful of new pages to celebrate it's anniversary and note the changes the industry had seen. Fast forward to the present, and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the book (which was actually first published in 1984, go figure) we have another new edition. Well, I say new addition but it's more the 10th anniversary edition with another small handful of new pages sewn into the back.

The content of those new pages is, however, interesting enough: updated contributions from the likes of original hacker interview candidates Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, plus new stars of the industry like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. The problem is, that new section is way too short for those of us who have already read the book. To be honest I was hoping for more than 16 pages tacked in at the back of the book, albeit a classic book for any self-respecting geek.

There can be no denying the fact that the original book, based upon a collection of more than a hundred interviews that Steven Levy conducted between 1982 and 1983, has stood the test of time well. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it should be essential reading for anyone …

Aha! That's true. :)

The only problem I can see with "Do not post articles that you have already published on another website" is that it means someone could get a warning/infraction for asking the same question here that they have asked on another site.

Unique content yes, but do we want to penalise someone for coming to DaniWeb if they have not found the answer/help they are looking for somewhere else?

And there you have it, confirmation that Ben Collin is The Stig as the BBC lose the fight to ban his book.

Or should I say was The Stig.

Wonder how the team are going to deal with this for the next series? A new Stig with a different colour outfit/helmet, or just ignore it and pretend nothing has happened?

Nice one Eyal!

Thanks for the vote of confidence AD, a lot of work went into boiling the rules down into the new shortened version. However, we are hopeful that we have managed to achieve clarity in brevity.

I just discovered that you have re-written the Member Rules. I like that :) Very brief, clear, and to the point. I don't know how long its been posted, but all members, both old and new, should be encouraged to read them again.

Warnings have been issued today not to complete a customer satisfaction survey that appears to come from McDonald's and promises cash for your answers. A bit like fast food itself, something that looks appetising and promises a quick fix is often not actually that good for you.

IT security and data protection company Sophos has today warned members of the public not to complete a customer satisfaction survey that promises cash in return for completing what claims to be a questionnaire about fast food originating from the McDonald's chain.

The survey is being spread by an email spam campaign of some considerable size, and purporting to come from the 'McDonald's Survey Department' using a subject line of 'McDonald's Customer Survey'. The full text of the email reads : "Dear customer, Please give us only 5 minutes of your valuable time to ask you some questions about our products. Please be aware that we will not ask you about any personal information. In return, we will credit $90.00 to your account - just for your time. If you want to answer our simply 8 questions, please click the link below. Thank you for helping us to become better. Sincerely, McDonald's Survey Department. Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response."

If someone opts to take the survey, they are then asked to provide a bunch of personal information as well as their credit card …

Or try the 'Click Here to Start a New Thread' link towards the top of every forum index page.

Hey, I'm meant to be a security expert and have won awards and stuff for writing about it, but I couldn't get my head around the point of the research either :)

When it comes to data storage and retrieval the current buzz is undoubtedly cloud-shaped, so why would anyone want to invest in Network Attached Storage? Two words: cost and capacity. Cloud services are great, but as far as storing and accessing large amounts of data is concerned things can get very expensive not to mention a little on the slow and clumsy side. Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices solve both the cost per Mb issue and that of access speeds. Unfortunately, setting up a NAS server to work how you want it has traditionally been a fairly complex business and one that has prevented all but the most determined home user (or those with a very geeky friend) from investing in the technology. Until now, that is.

What Dane-Elec has managed to achieve with the newly launched myDitto Server is quite remarkable: this is a truly beginner level, three-step, plug and play NAS device. Seriously folks, not only do you not need to be a network engineer to set it up but you don't need to have one as a close friend you can call for when things go pear shaped either. The amount of technical know-how required to set up the myDitto is approaching a big fat zero, and just requires three basic steps as follows:Plug the myDitto Server into your router and power it up. Now plug one of the supplied myDitto USB keys into your PC (or Mac for that matter) and run …

I'm approaching 50 way too fast and haven't noticed any common sense appearing yet...