How we depend on technology in school

Today I was just finishing up my Geo project and I realized (just like my other 'realization' moments that I've documented in this blog) that we depend so much on computers these days that it actually makes us less intelligent. For example, instead of checking and knowing the spelling the word and using dictionaries when doing projects we can just us a spell checker in a word processing program. Although this makes is more convenient for us, we don't look at the correct spelling of the word all we do is right click on the word and select the spelling that looks correct to us, without even bothering to learn the spelling.

After I thought about it it seemed to me that people are getting carried away by technology and that's why we are loosing our normal intelligence that we always had. It's not a bad thing, because I'm quite certain that things like computers are always going to be with us (although nothing is for granted) but it's not a great thing too.

I know for sure that soon after I finished this blog post and finished my homework, I'm definitely going to start writing things out the 'old school' way instead of just typing things out and handing them in. I believe that this way, I won't loose touch of technology and at the same time I won't forget how to use the dictionary and write as well.

It's getting hot in here

Literally! It's kind of a good thing and a bad thing when you come to think of it. I mean, first of all us Canadians have to face about (and no we don't pronounce it as a-boot) 6 months of winter, freezing, cold and chilly. Then we get about 3 months of summer, when it gets pretty hot, but the only problem is sometimes it gets too hot to tolerate (does that make any sense?) so we need to rely on AC's etc.

Oh well, atleast the good thing about summer is.... school's out for summer! And in about 3 weeks I can enjoy what summer has to offer. But before that I must go through the following:

1. 6 big projects (that I need to do all by my self... including work of others in my group like I mentioned over here).
   
2. 5 Exams- That are worth a lot
3. Learn more stuff because the teachers aren't apparently finished the whole curriculum
4. Homework- We still aren't exempt from getting homework I guess
5. Practice Exams and tests- We need to go through the usual review, practice tests and exams.

Phew... it'll be a great relief after all that stuff is done.

Make Microsoft Windows XP Passwords more secure

We all know that Microsoft sometimes has problems in their operating systems. Sometimes they just don't do somethings correctly (like the WMF exploit that we all know about) and it's up to us to tweak our computer to make it correct. That's why today I'm going to talk a little bit about the security of Windows XP because we all care about it.

Now, you might not know this so let's start from the basics. All windows user passwords are stored as hashes... which simply mean that they are encrypted to protect it. But windows uses something called LMhash to store the passwords. Which is not good news if you want to keep your data secure. Here's how you can fix this.

Prevent your Windows PC from getting hacked

Basically what LMhash (or Lan Manager hash) does is converts the password to upper case, makes it 14 characters long, splits the 'encrypted password' into 7 pairs etc. So it sort or puts it into the same format every single time, and since hackers know this format it just makes it easier to crack because its not totally different every time. You can read more about it from Microsoft, the geniuses who created this in the first place.

So what you want to to is stop using the LMhash to convert the passwords to make it more easily accessible. And this is very simple to do using the registry. All you do is enable the noLMhash value and Windows will stop using LMhash... simple.

Here's how you do it:

• Make sure you have admin privileges before you continue
• Make sure that you back up the registry before you perform this tweak

1. Click 'Start'
2. Click 'Run'
3. Type in 'regedit' (without the quotes of course).
4. Then navigate to the following registry key using the left column : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
5. In the right column Double click on nolmhash
6. In the box that pop's up type in 1 and click 'OK'
7. Click regedit and the reboot your computer.
8. Important: Change Your Password! Or else the old hash is still going to remain there and the tweak won't do you any good. And make sure that you keep changing your password at regular intervals.
   

Congratulations, your passwords are now going to be more secure and less crackable, however you still need to take more precautions so that you don't loose any important data. I'm sure when I have more time I'm going to write up more articles on how to do this, so make sure you subscribe so that you don't miss a beat.

Blank email messages in Microsoft Outlook 2007

If you're having problems with seeing text in Microsoft Outlook 2007 beta and can't see the body of the e-mail message or can't see the text, then I might have the solution for you!

I too had the same problem where I could not read my e-mail messages, why? Because of AVG Anti-Virus's E-mail Scanner. That's why all you need to do to be able to view your future e-mail messages that you get is disable certifying AVG's Email Scanner. If you have any other anti virus, then you should refer to the help file that came with it or check on the manufacturer's website on how to stop the anti virus from putting the footer that says it's checked the e-mails. I you are able to fix the problem then please leave a comment on how you did so.

This means that you won't be seeing the Message 'No threat found by AVG at the end of the message'. However AVG will still check for threats.

1. Open up AVG Control Center by right clicking the AVG icon in your sys tray and selecting Launch Control Center.
2. Double click on E-mail Scanner. (you can also click on E-mail scanner then click on properties)
   
3. Click on button that says 'Configure'.
4. Uncheck both the 'Certify Mail' check boxes under 'Email Scanning'.
5. Click on 'OK' twice on both the screens
   
6. Restart Microsoft Outlook 2007.

Now you should be able to see all the messages without a problem. However.. I'm afraid that the e-mails that outlook has already downloaded need to be downloaded again for you to view them properly. So if you have a lot of blank messages, you will have to download them again.

Why this works is probably because of the changes in outlook. When AVG (or perhaps any other Antivirus) tries to certify the e-mail messages, it probably tries to edit the code. Doing that then corrupts the code in the e-mail message (even if it is plain text) therefore causing Outlook to display a blank e-mail. So if you direct AVG to not edit the e-mail, just scan through it you shouldn't have any problems in reading it (hopefully). I'm sure that other Anti-Viruses also have the same problem, so you must direct them not to put in the certification footer and you should be able to download e-mail properly until Microsoft fixes the problem.

Microsoft doesn't mind piracy

Interestingly enough Microsoft doesn't care that much about piracy even though they might be loosing out on millions of dollars because of it. Besides, how can they possible stop it anyway? I think what Microsoft is doing here is a intelligent move, because I'd rather be writing better code than trying to make sure that it only works for legit users. How else can the company progress?

And they'll also be giving all the important security updates for the users of counterfiet software. I guess they are really realizing that if their software is good nothing can stop the piracy, because they is always a way to illegally get serial numbers and hacks and cracks.

I for one don't think piracy is a good idea as well, because as a programmer I realize how much hard work goes into making a piece of code actually work and the planning and getting rid of bugs, and they need to get paid too. Besides with so much open source software, I don't think I'll ever be pirating software... ever! I'd rather use Linux and Open Office and use Thunderbird for my e-mail as opposed to Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 and using Outlook for e-mail.

Dude, Where's the tech help?

Right now I'm very busy with a lots of things such as tech help and so on. However if you do need help here are some things that are definately going to help you out. I'll be back with cool posts on how to optimize stuff and so on, however right now I just don't seem to have enough time. So here are some resources which you can use.

Windows Related Problems

• MSnews- Microsoft has done a great job of building a great tech support community, so if you have any help then I recommend that you join the following newsgroup. If you are using Windows XP then make sure you join: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general newsgroup and the microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support. If you need more help on how to use newsgroups take a look at this KB article.
  
• How to make good posts- If you have a problem then make sure you read this post so that you can ask your question properly and get helped incase you seem to need some help.
  

Other Computer Related Problems

• Tech-Recipes- Has lots of articles and a forum that is guaranteed to be very helpful.
• Syschat- The place to go where you are assured to get a reply, and get your problem solved.

Apple Related problems

• Apple Support- You will most likely find all the necessary articles over here and make sure to also take a look at the discussions section.
  

Sorry if I don't reply to any of your e-mail or comments, I'll make sure to do that as soon as I have time, and put up a support section on this site as well.

How to fix your iPod Shuffle

The tips listed below were provided by Stephen Grandy (thanks!) in the comments section of the iPod shuffle problems part 2 post. Since this tip seems to be very useful, I advise you all you give it a try and try to get rid of the problem where iTunes or your computer does not recognize the shuffle.

Here are the instructions given below:

I have found a lot of problems with the IPOD Shuffle. The best way is to not charge it via the computer and get a cheap USB Adapter. That is the first thing to do.

The second part is if you have any problems with your IPOD then
open it as a hard drive in windows, providing it is detected. Delete the IPOD Control Directory.

Now you need to get the following file: http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net/
it may be in zip format so make sure you know about this. You may also need Python Programming Language that is free. Copy the program to your shuffle. Now copy the files over as you would any hard drive mp3 etc drag and drop and run this nifty program it will rebuild the database.

Put your shuffle in and itunes will see it as a new shuffle and ask what you want to name it etc. Name it whatever you want and then you will go your IPOD Control Directory Back. Now simply run rebuild and it will rebuild the files database.

Your iPOD Shuffle should now work.

PS: This is the only method I have known to work. I have tried all other kinds of Methods and they have resulted in nothing.

If you want to spend cash then a nice program is Anipod. But if you don't want to fork out over 20 dollars then my Method works and works well.

Steve

Thanks Steve! I'm sure this is going to help many out there who don't know in which direction to go. However I must warn users that this might void your warranty therefore, please use only if your support period is over etc.

You might also want to take a look at iPod shuffle problems part 1 and part 2 as well as unplug your ipod properly and stop the orange/green lights posts, how to use iPod and iTunes post or other posts that are mentioned. Sadly, there are so many things you can do to fix your iPod =( !

Are you a Perfectionist?

Are you a perfectionist or do you happen to know one? Then make sure that you take the 'Perfectionist Quiz'. I am apparently a perfectionist according to the quiz... but I'm not sure if it's true or not. I make ever effort to strive toward perfection but sometimes I guess it's just me thinking that what I've done is perfect.

Okay now I'll stop with my usual talk, but make sure you comment on how you scored. I'm curious to see how many perfectionists are there in this world.

Finished recording podcast

Today my group finished recording podcasts for business class... basically it was just me and other two ESL (or English Second Language) students, that's why I didn't even bother uploading it. The other two in my group didn't bother to show up. I guess people really don't care about group work as such. The same things happen all the time in other subjects as well, and in the end it's just me doing all the work and the other just getting their marks for me.

This seriously drives me crazy! How can people not do anything... and still get marks. And the funny thing is that many teachers also evaluate you as a group. For example in drama... because the other people never showed up even though we did it affected our marks.

Anyways, if all of you are wondering where all the tech help articles are and why I'm not going on Syschat or Tech-recipes it is because of the projects that I have. Handling 5 projects in tandem is not an easy task, and since it affects my marks greatly I don't want to screw up on this one. Therefore it's going to be a while until the tech-related content starts again, my guess would be summer right after my exams are done.

GIMP UB available

Wow, this is a shocker. Apparently open source is ahead of Adobe now, because if you have a Intel Mac then you can get the universal binary of Gimpshop for free. For those of who you don't know GIMP (which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is something just like Adobe Photoshop, and has almost all the features as photoshop. Although photoshop might be better and have a smaller learning curve it does cost a lot and is fairly slow on a Mac (because it uses Rosetta) when compared to GIMP.

Although I won't be using GIMP all that much (since I still prefer photoshop) I think it is a great opportunity for all you wanna be graphic designers (or just want to try out how photoshop feels like) to take GIMP for a test drive. You certainly wont say that its not a good program (unless of course you are addicted/used to Adobe Photoshop).

What is Sysfader.exe and how to stop sysfader errors

What is sysfader.exe?

Well, no first of all, it is not spyware (usually... click here to check if its spyware or not »). In fact it is a part of Windows XP that provides all the so called "cool animation effects". These include fading menus in and out. Animating windows and so on. However, the fact is that you don't need sysfader on your computer. You're better off without it, especially if you're getting a lot of 'Sysfader.exe has crashed' errors or if your computer is running slow. Even if you don't think it's slow I recommend you read the whole article below.

Important: Make sure you take a look at how to figure out if sysfader is a virus or not and find out if the sysfader.exe you are seeing is a virus/spyware or if it's the real deal.

I also read a couple of e-mail from people telling me that they had an error regarding sysfader.exe. I'm guessing that this might be a common problem for a lot of people, besides the tips mentioned in this post are good for any computer running Windows. Be it Windows XP or Windows Vista (although the instructions for disabling unnecessary effects are different for Vista).

Note: Please see an alternate way to fix sysfader.exe problem in this post »

To get rid of this problem all you need to do is this:

1. Press Windows Flag (Windows Key) + Pause break key. If you don't have the Windows key (most keyboards should have this - right beside the Alt key) just right click on My Computer and click Properties.
2. Go to the 'Advanced' tab
3. Under 'Performance' click on 'Settings'
4. Under the 'Visual Effects' tab uncheck the first four check boxes
5. These 4 boxes are "Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing", "Fade or slide menus into view", "Fade of slide ToolTips into view" and "Fade out menu items after clicking". Please note that if you are running other localizations of Windows XP (for example Windows XP Portugese) you have to find the options that somewhat describe the options mentioned above, since they might not be the first 4 options.
6. To make your computer even more faster, uncheck other checkboxes for the effects that you feel you can live without, for example "Slide taskbar buttons" etc...
   
7. If you like your Windows XP theme the way it is don't uncheck the last option that says "Use visual styles on windows and buttons". I also recommend you leave the "smooth edges of screen fonts" and "Use common tasks in folders" options unchecked"
8. If you don't use a wallpaper then I recommend you also uncheck "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop"
   
9. Click on 'OK'

After doing this the problem with sysfader should instantly go away (hopefully). And your computer is going to become much more faster without those annoying (at least I find it annoying) effects slowing it down. Please read other articles on how to make windows xp faster if you want to make your computer faster, and get rid of other .exe errors with windows that seem to happen oh so frequently.

Tech Crunch Redesign

I recently noticed Tech crunch has changed a lot (in terms of it's design). It now features 'mean-green' accents to a plane white background. Although this might sound simple and not all that great as compared to the previous one, I think Rachel Cunliffe did a fabulous job. Any redesign is always good... and can only be better or just as good as the previous one. I should know... after doing a lot of redesigns to this site, I finally settled on this kind of simple, and elegant gray theme. And then I went on to realize that it's not design that people really care about.

The only thing that bugs me in this design is probably the amount of advertisements.... there are so many of them. But I don't really care about that because I usually just read the RSS feed from techcrunch and don't bother to go to the site (and my Firefox+Firewall also seem to get rid of most of the ads in any website).

As long as the re-design doesn't affect the quality of Michael's writing I think I'll be subscribing to tech-crunch for a long while. No matter what the site looks like.

BBC's great blunders

IT WAS not until midway through the live television interview that the BBC interviewer started to grow suspicious. The man whom she believed to be an expert on internet music downloads seemed to know precious little about his subject.

Look's like BBC has outdone Lifehacker, by a mile of course. How come people make such great blunder? It almost seems impossible that a cab driver was considered to be an 'expert' in online music. Besides how come the cab driver didn't say anything? If I'm correct I think this scenerio can be referred to as identity theft because the cab driver was someone else even though it was an accident. And perhaps even caused a problem to the real person's reputation.

One thing's for sure, if I were ever to be an interviewer, I am definitely going to double check.

Skype UB for Mac

Yay! Skype, an application that I dearly love and appreciate finally has UB (universal binary- which means you can run this application on Intel mac's without having extra software (rosetta) running)... so it runs faster, way more faster. And now I can use it without a problem. Except one thing is missing, who can I talk to?

But I usually use Skype to talk to many friends, and developers all over the world sometimes to get suggestions for something that I'm working on or even help. Since everybody uses computers these days, it's become the telephone of today (although the same can be said for VoIP). And may be that's why some countries are trying to block it because who wouldn't want some free long distance calls? And some companies are even creating gadgets for skype... but I'm not sure if it is going to be a reality.

And in other news, wasn't the Macbook supposed to be released today? I guess Apple tricked us all... again.

Am I good or what?

In business class today we were playing the fictionary 'business/entrepreneur' game over at JA. Interestingly enough my team was mostly made up of people who didn't speak English as their first language (also commonly known as ESL students) but that didn't matter... because they were smart.

So today we started playing the game, and sure enough we had a strategy... a good one. Our plan was to make companies feel like they shouldn't change anything and if they kept doing what they were doing... they would do fine. And of course, it worked like a charm.

Until the last quarter we didn't attempt to get the first place, however we stayed in second place although getting first place was quite possible. But when the last quarter came, we changed everything in our plan, so that we could be the company. Unfortunately I can't tell you the strategy yet. Mainly because the game isn't done yet and we are going to be playing another one soon, and giving out my plans would make me a traitor. And when you are a president of a group then that's the last thing you would want!

Got Milk Mic?

How come nobody seems to have a microphone with them... almost nobody in my group (in business class) doesn't seem to have a microphone. Then how am I going to make a podcast over Skype? I guess I will have to use the computer at school (they're good but I don't think they have Audition). Along with that, I don't think I will have enough time to edit and so on.

Oh well I guess there's nothing I can do about it. I wonder how many people don't have a microphone (and no the ones in web cams don't count).

Scary Movie 4 was hilarious

If there is one movie that you can watch I would recommend Scary Movie 4... by far. Although it doesn't have a theme as such (well it's a mixture of other scary movies) it is downright hilarious, and I can't stop laughing. If you've watched other movies like the grudge or the village, then it's going to be even more funny, you'll see when you decide to go and see the movie.

I've watched other movies (like RV) as well however this one wins my vote for one of the best right now. I still can't stop laughing...

Firefox - The Blinking Cursor Problem

Quick Answer: Press the F7 key, and turn off Caret Browsing

Long Answer:
Recently I was reinstalling Firefox, because I was trying to check if reinstalling it is going to ruin my profile (like it did last time) or not. After all that was done and I opened up Firefox and went to browse around I noticed that the cursor started blinking on the screen.

Now, since I've played around quite a bit with Firefox, I didn't panic because I instantly knew that it was a feature called 'caret browsing' (not really... :) it took me a while to figure out what in the world it was!). The main reason that Firefox has this feature is that you can select text with your keyboard.


If you want to get rid of this the solution is simple... press F7 (or read the next paragraph if you are on a mac and your F7 key is mapped to something else.. if you press F7 it should work on your mac too but just in case it doesn't)! And if you want to turn it on again then you need to do the same as well. So now when you see blinking cursors on the screen when you are browsing through web pages don't freak out... it's just caret browsing.

Oh and as Long Island Nurse points out, pressing F7 isn't the only way. You can also type in "about:config" in the address bar and then type in "caret" in the filter box and simply double click to change the option from "true" (which means turn on caret browsing) to "false" (which means turn off caret browsing). Thanks Long Island Nurse!

How to start Podcasting

Today in class we talked a little bit about podcasting, and this is just a quick note to tell you that I will soon write up an article on how to do that.

However before I do that you might want to take a look at Audacity and get familiar with it... because that is what the tutorial is going to be based on. So go on and download it (you also might want to get the LAME encoder pack) and get ready for podcasting! And if you are going to do a podcast with someone far away I suggest you also get Skype and get familiar with that as well.

Sphere is here

Today I was just browsing through the net (just like any other day) and I realized that Google blogsearch wasn't the only one out there. First I must say that Sphere a San Fransisco based start up has a great site design, very intuitive and easily navigable and I absolutely love (well it's not perfect, but close enough) their gradient selection, it reminds me of the Visual Studio site. And by the looks of it since Google is looking out for more programmers I don't think their blog search is going to look as good as Sphere any time soon. The same goes for technorati, although technorati does seem to show only the most recent posts made by bloggers.

In ability to search through blogs is just as good. And I've actually got a couple of hits from Sphere already! Along with that all the posts are indexed from the past 4 months, so you can easily search through all the different posts I've put up. By default it only searches through the posts put up in the last week though however this can easily be changed by changing the setting to 'last four months'. Choosing the 'custom range' option is also a good way of getting more of what you want.

However, when I compared the search results with the Google Blogsearch Sphere didn't do all that well. For example I searched on 'iPod Shuffle Problems' one of the top posts in this blog on Blogsearch and my post was the 9th post. On Sphere it wasn't even there. Why? Because it wasn't indexed yet because this post was made a while ago... This experiment was also repeated on technorati (using normal settings) with similar results as Sphere, my post wasn't to be seen anywhere. Along with that for some reason technorati seemed to be down when I was trying to search.

So I guess it is safe to say that each have their own advantages and disadvantages... and Sphere might turn out to be the better one if they can do a great job of indexing (since right now they are out to get new servers I believe) and probably try to implement some light-weight AJAX (i.e. AJAX that doesn't take too much time to load) to give it a little web 2.0 pizzaz (but too much web 2.0 is bad as well). Therefore, right now I think Google Blogsearch is the best if you want to search through blogs in particular in general although results might vary.