Category: Technology Page 7 of 9

[:en]On matters relating to computer hardware, software, and other technical goodies.[:de]Beiträge über Hardware, Software und Ähnliches[:]

Wireless for the Masses

By Fips

On 15th December 2008

In Technology

Free hotspots in your area?

In the last year, I heard how Dublin City Council had given up on plans to run a free, city-wide wireless Internet programme on the grounds that it was against EU regulations, anti-competitive and bad for the consumer. As Ireland currently has some of the slowest and most expensive broadband options available in Europe, it seems obvious how the consumer will benefit from having to continue paying for their poor services. But there could be a nicer alternative to centralised WiFi. In a post much earlier this year, Bruce Schneier generated a lot of debate when he claimed he leaves his wireless network open and unprotected for just about anyone to use. This he considers a common courtesy, and whilst acknowledging the risks, considers them to be largely inflated. As many of the people commenting on his article or reporting about it elsewhere point out, there are risks involved, and as far as many of the people in authority are concerned, his common courtesy leaves him much more culpable. Many ISPs stipulate that sharing a connection in this manner would be a breach of contract, and from a legal perspective infringements undertaken by someone piggybacking the network could result in a rather unwelcome investigation for the owner.

I recently installed Ubuntu on a system with a slightly irregular hard drive configuration. Two SATA drives were running Windows on a mirrored (fake) RAID array, and a third SATA drive was ready to have linux installed. The Ubuntu installer recognised the drive as the third hard drive, and installed itself as expected, with Grub installed in the MBR of this drive, being first in the BIOS’ boot queue. However, all references in Grub’s menu.lst for the Ubuntu installation pointed to (hd2,0), which resulted in an “Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition.” message from Grub. The solution was simply to edit the entries to read (hd0,0) for (hd2,0) as Grub now recognised the third drive as the first on account of its place in the boot order.

By Fips

On 16th October 2008

In Asides, Technology

Dealing with Spam

By Fips

On 18th September 2008

In Pet Hates, Technology

If there’s one jargon term that every user new to the Internet soon becomes acquainted with, spam must near the top of the list. Its prevalence and virtual ubiquity through many forms of online communication have generated miniature industries devoted to dealing with it, and the science of spam detection, prevention and treatment almost resembles the tactical skirmishes of biological immune systems.

Spam exists in many forms, from bogus guestbook entries to elaborate instant messaging robots, but the variety which prompted this post was that classic form – unsolicited email. The level of penetration of spam illustrates itself in the number of systems put in place to combat it as standard on the vast majority of websites, including of course authentication emails and the ever evolving captcha. I use a small combination of plugins on this blog to block out most of the spam, and given the extreme sparcity of genuine comments, the potential for inconvenient ‘false positives’ is rather slim. Nevertheless, even the cursory inspection I tend to make over Akismet’s latest haul becomes tiresome for all the size of this blog – spam comments to date outnumber genuine ones by a factor of almost 500 (and that only counts those caught and tallied by Akismet). Quite how larger, more popular blogs deal with searching for false positives, I don’t know, but the task must be fairly time-consuming.

Mapped Drives in Windows XP

By Fips

On 10th September 2008

In Asides, Technology

Having recently set up some network storage, I came across a rather irritating problem mapping network drives in Windows XP. The basic setup procedure, as outlined here, worked perfectly on some systems, but failed to retain the stored username/password for network attached drives requiring alternative login details. The solution found, courtesy of this blog, is to map the drives using the following command (replacing U with the drive letter, and NETHOME\LOCID with the relevant UNC network location):

NET USE U: \\NETHOME\LOCID /PERSISTENT:YES /SAVECRED

The necessary username/password details can then be entered and should be stored, allowing the drive to be mapped automatically when the user logs on.

Strange Mouse Cursor Issues

By Fips

On 17th May 2008

In Asides, Technology

A friend of mine was having a strange problem with her Dell XPS system, whereby the active area of the mouse cursor would move with apparent randomness, occasionally being located as it should be at the arrow’s point, sometimes at its middle, other times half an inch below. This post led us to the solution that a simple graphics driver update was required, coincidentally for the same ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card.