http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2005/12.php .
.
.
Last night, my wife and I went to the annual "Neighborhood Nibble," at one of our neighbor's home. About 25 neighbors
gathered to share appetizers, desserts and conversation for about 3 hours. It was really fun to visit with several neighbors for
the first time since we bought our house, and the whole event proved once again that, as wonderful as our dream home and
neighborhood are, the very best thing about our neighborhood is our neighbors.
IMPORTANT: A few days ago, researchers discovered a serious security vulnerability that has been in all versions of Windows for many years. Since that discovery, hackers have figured out many ways to exploit the security vulnerability. RIGHT NOW, your Windows computer is in serious danger of being infected by all kinds of viruses and other malicious exploits, even if you have installed all of the latest Windows security updates, and even if all you're doing is browsing Web sites and checking your email. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not issued a Windows update to fix the vulnerability yet. In the meantime, various reports say that tens of thousands of computers have been infected all over the world, many by doing things as simple as visiting an infected Web site or viewing an infected email message or instant message. My brother-in-law's computer was infected yesterday, making it unable to connect to the Internet. Overnight last night, antivirus software (running from a CD) found over 200 pieces of spyware, viruses and other malicious software on his previously "clean" computer. Because the new vulnerability exists in nearly all Windows computers, a lot of computers will be harmed before Microsoft issues a permanent fix for it. Several security sites have posted what is so far the only known temporary fix for the problem. The temporary fix disables Windows' Picture and Fax Viewer, which reportedly fixes the vulnerability, but by doing that, it also prevents Windows from being able to display thumbnail images. I'm sure that when Microsoft releases a permanent fix, that fix will allow Windows to display thumbnail images again. IF YOU DO NOT APPLY THE TEMPORARY FIX, then not only could your computer become infected very quickly, but even if you were able to remove all of the infections, it could get re-infected just as quickly as it got infected the first time. That's why I urge you to apply the temporary fix RIGHT NOW, before you browse to any other Web sites or read any email messages. Here are the exact steps that you need to do to apply the temporary fix:
regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll
When you see that pop-up message, you'll know that you just unregistered the tiny part of Windows that has the serious security vulnerability. Several experts agree with Microsoft that, at that point, your computer will be relatively safe from the newest Windows exploits, but there are no guarantees, because "the bad guys" may find a way to get around that temporary fix. The downside of the temporary fix is that you won't be able to view any thumbnail images in Windows until you download and install whatever official permanent fix Microsoft ends up issuing for the vulnerability. Let's hope they do it soon.
Because this is a very important story that affects a lot of people, I will leave it on my home page for a couple of days, to make sure that everyone has a good chance to read it.
Are you good at understanding scientific theories? See if you understand all
13 Things That Do Not Make Sense.
The last several days of the year always seem to inspire people to compile lists. Two of this year's most interesting compilations are Offbeat Escapades From 2005 and Popular Mechanics' Top 50 Inventions (in the past 50 years).
This morning, I cancelled my reseller account with my former Web host. Then, I updated
ComputerBob's Guide To Web Hosts, to explain why I moved my clients' and my Web sites to
a different Web host.
It might take some effort to understand their often-poor English grammar and usage, but
TeacherClick's many free online
software tutorials are pretty informative.
If you've ever been dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend, you know how bad that feels. And how you'd do just about anything to
try to get them back. So, even if you were smart enough to know that logic plays virtually no role in affaires de l'amour,
you might still create an online presentation called
Why You Should Continue To Date Me.
Have you ever owned any of the devices on PC Magazine's list of The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years? It came as a surprise to me that I've only ever owned one of them -- #25. Then again, I think that some of the gadgets that I owned over the years were better than some of the ones on that list.
Christmas Day, 2006, was the second anniversary of my wife, our pets, and me arriving in Florida from the Frostbite State. I invite you to read my Journal entries from back then, which document our fun and often-miraculous adventures during that very exciting time in our lives.
After hearing that my wife and I were going to be "Christmas orphans" this year, our next-door-neighbors and wonderful friends,
Mike and Annamarie, generously "adopted us." We got to share their delicious Christmas
dinner of barbecue ribs and pork steaks, and visit with them and their three friendly dogs, Oliver, Sasha, and Cairo.
Whether you revere it, revile it, or anything in between, I wish you a very Merry Christmas!
Last night, Randy Stafford, author of 4 Guest Articles for this site, sent me a 3-minute Windows Media video of an Ohio man's amazing Christmas lights show, in which his entire house and front yard "sing and dance" to the powerful, driving sounds of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's song, "Wizard in Winter." It completely blew me away. I would love to post it right here on this site, but I don't want to infringe upon anyone's copyrights, so instead, I highly recommend that you read the whole story and download the video yourself. I guarantee that your children, relatives, friends, and neighbors will want to see it over and over.
I am very happy to report that the process of moving all of my clients' and my Web sites to a new Web host this past week went
absolutely flawlessly. All of the sites went through the entire process without even one minute of downtime.
Just as I suspected might happen, this Web site's server switch-over process finished about 1:30 yesterday afternoon. At that point, I started seeing this site coming from the new server, just as most people in the world had already been doing for nearly 36 hours. It's now 4:30 AM, Saturday morning, and the old server has had zero visits in the past 15 hours. I'll wait another few days, just to make sure that there aren't any email messages "stuck in the pipes" between the old server and the new one. After that, I'll cancel my hosting account with my previous Web hosting provider and update ComputerBob's Guide To Web Hosts to explain why I switched my clients' and my Web sites to a different provider.
My wife and I went out for a drive Friday night, to look at Christmas lights. There's one large neighborhood about ten miles away that always puts on a great show. Unfortunately, we hadn't thought about the fact that it was 2 days before Christmas and a Friday night. There was a long, long, long, long line of cars crawling up and down every street in that whole area. It took us almost 10 minutes just to crawl one block into the neighborhood, turn around, and drive back out. At least, we managed to find some pretty displays in other neighborhoods on our way home. Here are photos of a fancy looking yard and a Florida-themed yard and Santa having a dolphin-powered accident.
UPDATE, 4:00 PM - I'm very happy to announce the publication of an excellent addition to
this site's Guest Articles section -- Randy Stafford's 4th Guest Article,
P2P Security Risks. It's a must-read for anyone who is thinking of using (or letting
their children use) peer-to-peer file-sharing software.
Happy Festivus! Did you remember to set up your aluminum pole? I'm looking forward to The Airing of Grievances. Tonight, after dinner, it will be time for Feats of Strength, and then my wife will wrestle me to the floor. I love any fake holiday that ends like that.
As of 9:00 this morning, I'm still getting this Web site from the old server. If things go the way they have in the past, I'll
probably start getting it from the new server this afternoon.
Here's a hard-to-look-at page that has many useful How-Tos For Windows XP. I think the link marked How To Get Windows XP To Boot Faster is misdirected, but the other links that I checked seemed to be right.
I stayed up until almost 4:00 this morning, switching my clients to a new server / provider, and then doing the necessary
clean-up work to ensure that their Web sites will function correctly on that server. Afterward, I made the administrative
changes to switch this site to the new server. As I write this, I'm seeing all of my clients' sites running very quickly on the new
server without any problems. The tests that I've conducted show that most of the U.S. is also seeing this site coming from
the new server, but I'm still seeing it coming from the old server. With a large and complicated site like this one, there are many
settings and other things that need to be manually changed in order for everything to continue working correctly, without any
downtime, when the site is moved to a different server. Please be patient if you see any problems during the switch-over process,
which could take another day or two to finish happening all over the world.
According to a report in The Scotsman, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, eager to try to take over the world, once ordered the creation of invincible, pain-resistant, half-man, half-ape soldiers for the Red Army. Fortunately for the world, the Soviet scientists' efforts were unsuccessful. Insert your own professional athlete joke here.
If you're wondering what I look like in my Santa hat, take a look at
this photo.
Just kidding -- that's actually the Pope!
If you like to wait until after Christmas to look for tech bargains, CNet's Top 100 Products is a good place to start your search. There, you'll find plenty of product descriptions and specifications, editors' reviews, and price comparisons. You'll also find feedback from people who own the various products, telling how well they work in real life.
Late this afternoon, I stopped by our local Wal-Mart to pick up a few things, while wearing the Santa hat that my cousin Vicki sent me a few days ago. At one point, I saw a little girl, about 3 years old, hanging on to the side of her mother's shopping cart as they swept past me. A second later, I heard her little voice call out, "I think you look cute in your Santa hat!" I looked back and saw her grinning at me, so I smiled and shouted back, "Thank you!"
My wife heard this at work yesterday: "If people want to put Christ back in Christmas, then instead of
spending their money at shopping malls, they should give it to the poor."
When I was a kid, I learned the
palindrome,
"A man, a plan, a canal: Panama." If you've ever tried to write a palindrome, you know that it's a very difficult task. In 2003, a
computer program created a nonsensical
17,259-word palindrome. I know you're
probably thinking, "Wow, Bob. Wow."
Rotten Tomatoes is a great source for critical reviews of over 125,000 movies. I hope you didn't waste any time or money seeing 2005's Worst Flicks.
A large box from my cousin Vicki arrived in Saturday's mail. My wife accurately described its
contents as "Christmas in a box."
Vicki sent us an amazing amount of stuff, including Christmas cards, homemade and storebought Christmas ornaments, candy, games,
noise makers, Target gift cards, a giant, dancing musical "s'more," a red Santa hat, a red and green elf hat (with elf ears), and a
very nice personal message
to each of us. The Santa hat is my new favorite. It's whimsical, colorful, and toasty warm. I wore it the whole rest of the day,
even when I went out to get us some supper. Thanks again, Vicki!
A store cashier asks you for your telephone number, so you give it to them. How much of your privacy did you give up? Possibly a lot more than you realized. When they ask me for mine, I politely decline.
It may be too late to help with your Christmas shopping, but at least for future reference, PC World does a good job of
explaining how to
Avoid the Top Online Shopping Gotchas.
Here's the only reason to leave your car unlocked in a public parking lot.
What do you imagine John Lennon would say about the John Lennon talking action figure that Yoko Ono is apparently planning to sell?
For the past few weeks here on the Gulf Coast, our daily high temperatures have generally been 65-70° (F). At night,
it's been getting down to 48-52°. Still, my wife and I haven't had to use any heat yet this season. Our energy
conservation method (called "pumping") may seem obvious, but I don't know anyone else who's doing it. During the day, we open all the shades on the
south side of the house, to let in as much sun as possible. We also open the sliding glass doors to our "Florida Room" (sun room),
to let its warm air into the rest of the house. Then, after work, if it's warmer outside than it is inside, we open all the windows
to let in the warm, fresh air. As soon as it gets cooler outside than it is inside, we shut the windows, shades and sliding glass
doors. As a result, our house has been 70-74° during the day, and 67-70° overnight.
One of the most fun things about living on the Gulf Coast is that we can go to the beaches pretty much any time we want. Last
night and tonight, the temperature was in the mid-60s (F) with no wind, so my wife and I went and collected lots of
tiny colorful shells
that look a lot like butterflies. On our way home, we looked at Christmas lights in a few neighborhoods, and laughed out loud when
we found a festive dolphin mailbox. I just love living here.
Take a good long look -- do you recognize
this man?
When I first saw him, I thought he looked kind of like Liam Neeson and kind of like one of my brothers-in-law. Who do you think he
is? Stop reading right here until you're ready to find out who he really is. You're ready now? OK. He's a fictional character, and
he was completely computer generated. Pretty cool, huh?
Before you buy that latest piece of technology, be sure to check TechBargains. It has hundreds of discount offers, coupons, and rebates for all kinds of technology.
For the past 19 months, I've been paying only 2.75 cents per minute (U.S.) for all of my state-to-state (U.S.) long distance
telephone calls. I found that excellent deal at
SaveOnPhone, a site that compares the very best
cheap long distance plans.
Time Magazine has published its list of the
50 Coolest Web Sites.
Take a look -- some of them actually are cool. I'm guessing that ComputerBob.com was #51.
After using my new Verizon DSL service for the past month, I'm very happy to report that it has been incredible, with zero downtime and absolutely no problems.
Unfortunately, when Verizon set up my DSL account, they did something wrong and switched my long distance
telephone carrier from my normal 2.75 cents-per-minute (U.S.D) long distance company to Verizon's 35 cents-per-minute plan. I called
them to straighten it all out, and they credited my account for their $114.79 overcharge. Then they told me
that I would have to call my normal long distance company to straighten out the problem at their end, too, and that I probably
wouldn't have any long distance service for a day or two until the problem was fixed. I wasn't very happy that I would
have to waste my time fixing a problem that was Verizon's fault, so I asked to speak to a supervisor. It took me almost an hour to
talk to 3 customer service reps and 3 supervisors, but in the end, I convinced them to give me an additional $25 credit
for all the trouble that their mistake had caused.
How many of
The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities
do you use? I don't use all of the types of software that they list, but I've used 9 of their picks for a long
time. Now I think I'll check out a few of their other choices.
Other than the fact that it was an painfully slow process, I never had any serious problems uploading hundreds of files at a time to my Web server with my old dial-up Internet connection. But when I switched to DSL a few weeks ago, I began having connection problems every time I tried to upload even a few files. Whether I used Dreamweaver or a separate FTP program (FileZilla), the transfers either wouldn't start, or they'd start, but then they'd stop after only one or two files, and an error message would tell me that it couldn't connect to my Web server. After thinking about it a few days, I finally figured out what was causing the problem, and all I had to do to fix it was change one configuration setting in both Dreamweaver and FileZilla. It turns out that there are two opposite ways to transfer files to a Web server -- Active FTP and Passive FTP. In Active FTP mode -- the default setting for Dreamweaver and most FTP software -- the Web server sends signals to your local computer to initiate the file transfers. In Passive FTP mode, your local computer is the one that sends those signals. Dreamweaver and FileZilla had both been using Active FTP mode, which had worked fine with my dial-up connection for the past several years. The problems started when I switched to a DSL Internet connection because every time my new DSL modem / firewall saw those Active FTP mode signals coming from my Web server, it thought that my local computer was "being attacked," so it blocked those signals, which disconnected my Web server and prevented the file transfers from taking place. Ever since I told Dreamweaver and FileZilla to use Passive FTP mode, my file uploads have been fast and completely error-free, even the other night, when I uploaded more than 600 files at one time.
Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because right now, it's 70° (F) here on the beautiful Gulf Coast of the
Sunshine State.
Yesterday, thanks to
a good explanation of why I
should do it, I changed the
character encoding
of all of this site's pages from the western-only IS0-8859-1 character set to the international
UTF-8 character set. After that,
I added translation links for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to the top of this site's home page, so that anyone whose computer has
the appropriate fonts can view this Web site in those languages. You may not have noticed those changes, but I'm hoping
that eventually, more than 1.3 billion people on the other side of the world will.
My cousin Vicki recently had a scary adventure when her bulldog, Bella, got loose and ran all
around the neighborhood. I heard
that 36-pound Bella wound up standing on thin ice in the middle of a neighbor's frozen swimming pool, and Vicki had to climb out
onto the diving board to retrieve her. The whole situation had a happy ending, but it could just as easily have turned
into a tragedy. I wonder if Bella would have been any safer if she had been wearing
Fido's First Cell Phone.
You know that three-tone "bee-bee-BEEEE" sound that you hear if you dial a U.S. telephone number that has been disconnected?
According to JunkBusters, if you record those
"out-of-service tones" at the beginning of your outgoing answering machine message, you'll fool some telemarketing companies into
not calling you again. Apparently, the telemarketers' computerized calling systems hang up when they hear those tones,
instead of "listening" to your entire message. If you call me and get my answering machine, you'll hear the following message:
"bee-bee-BEEEE -- If you were a telemarketer, your automated calling system would have hung up as soon as it
heard those tones. Since you're a real person, please feel free to leave us a message." JunkBusters has a sound file of
those tones that you can download, along with many helpful tips for dealing with telemarketers, spam, and junk mail, plus tips for
protecting your privacy when you're online.
Would you like to try some tweaks, to see if they speed up your computer? If so, then read 10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows XP. If you're really adventurous, you may also want to read its counterpart, 10 Intermediate Ways To Speed Up Windows.
Researches have discovered that
dogs laugh,
and the recorded sound of a laughing dog will calm other dogs. I wonder what the researchers did that the dogs thought was so funny.
Years ago, I subscribed to a computer support newsletter published by author, radio host, and self-described "digital goddess,"
Kim Komando. A short time later, I noticed that her
newletter often contained material that appeared to me to have been copied without attribution from other PC newsletters and online
sources. I wrote to her, calling her attention to the problem, but I never received a reply. So I unsubscribed from her newsletter.
Jump forward in time about 10 years. Last weekend, after listening to the Kim Komando radio show, I decided to give one of her
weekly newsletters another try. This morning, after reading it, I immediately unsubscribed from it again. To me, it was tiresome to
scroll through what seemed like about 2/3 self-promotion and advertising, looking for the bits of useful content. In fact, I felt
the same way when I visited her Web site a few times this past week. Obviously, I must not be a member of her target audience, but
of course, your mileage may vary. So take a look at her site, try her newsletters, and see what you think of them. Then see what
you think of my favorite computer support newsletter for the past several years, the
LangaList.
I used to really like the TV show, 7th Heaven. I thought it did a great job of portraying a likable, loving family, figuring out how to work together to deal with both trivial and important issues that touched their lives. Unfortunately, over the years, the family's issues became preachingly political; the minister father completely lost his ability to cope with his children; menopause turned the loving mother into a mentally unstable harpy; the older children became completely self-involved and "turned bad"; the unrealistically precocious, lying ten-year-old daughter was portrayed as the family's most mature, best source of advice; the family took on a never-ending series of dramatically troubled (but always physically attractive) teenage houseguests; the main characters all turned into disturbingly brooding caricatures; and the entire show became a joyless soap opera. For a long time, I kept watching it every week, hoping that it would return to its wholesome roots. It never did, so I stopped watching it several months ago.
The people at the highly entertaining site,
Jump The Shark, know exactly what
I'm saying. Here's their definition of "jumping the shark": "It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that
your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill. Some call it the
climax. We call it "Jumping the Shark." From that moment on, the program will simply never be the same"...
"The aforementioned expression refers to the telltale sign of the demise of Happy Days, our favorite example,
when Fonzie actually 'jumped the shark.'" Go to JTS and tell the world when each of your favorite TV shows
started going downhill.
Early this morning, MediaPost Publications posted a very interesting
follow-up
to the blogger's online-buying horror story to which I linked two days ago. The follow-up describes what may be the first
documented case of swift, merciless, Internet-based vigilante justice, dished out to a reportedly unscrupulous online store.
