Anybody with Windows Automatic Updates enabled should get a nagging message in the next 24hrs. It’s worth installing the new security patch asap, as the problem with animated cursors, of all things, is actively being exploited. It’s highly unlikely you’ll come across an infected website, but it can’t hurt to be safe. If you don’t have WAU enabled (and if not, why not?) you should head over to Windows Update and pick up the patch. Don’t be tempted by the ‘Microsoft Update’ option, though - it’s still evil.

I took a geekily pleasing 256 photographs this weekend, and I was planning to use Adobe Lightroom to process them. I’d heard good reports of the new photo management / editing app, so last week I downloaded the 30-day trial. After a few hours play I was impressed, with a few caveats (that I now understand). A trial run with this weekend’s photos seemed like a good idea.

Immediately I ran into a problem. There were differences between the appearance of photos in LR and anything else:

Even exporting from LR produced something almost identical to the right-hand image, when viewed in anything but LR - what was going on? I considered asking for help on the LR Flickr group, but a quick Google suggested my question was common. To understand it, I needed to learn about colour management. I’m not there yet, but here’s what I know so far:

The average photograph viewer assumes everybody has a perfect computer monitor. They see a photograph with a blue sky and tell the monitor to display a blue sky. However, monitors are not perfect. Yours may be bad at displaying reds, mine might be too strong on the greens. The differences can be dramatic. The solution to this is the monitor profile, which contains information on the shortcomings of the particular unit. ‘Colour-managed’ applications look at the blue sky and adapt it according to the monitor profile: if your monitor isn’t good with blues, it’ll punch up the blue by an appropriate amount that you see the photograph as it ‘actually’ is.

My usual picture management utilities - Picasa, ACDSee and Microsoft Picture Viewer - don’t support this kind of colour-management. Adobe Lightroom does, hence the differences.

As it happens, I think the right-hand image is far more representative of the actual scene. It appears my Dell-supplied monitor profile is a bit dodgy. But even if I had a perfectly calibrated monitor, the only people to see exactly the same colours as me would be the ones using equally well calibrated programs. Neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer have this kind of colour-management (although the Mac-only Safari does, I think), so the vast majority of people are not going to see the image exactly as I intend. Having said that, I haven’t seen major differences when viewing my images on other people’s computers, suggesting that gambling with colours works passably most of the time.

However, I’d like to use a colour-managed application like Lightroom, as then I at least know similarly equipped people will see the colours as intended. I need to calibrate my monitor. How to do that? With a calibration device like the Pantone Eye-One Display Pro 2, currently listing at £140. Screw that. Adobe Gamma might be able to produce a roughly-correct profile without attached hardware, but AG only comes with Photoshop, the 30-day trial of which isn’t currently working…

Even if I can’t properly calibrate the colours, Lightroom’s management and editing facilities are excellent and I’d like to use them. Unfortunately as of now the colours are too far out for it to be useful, and LR doesn’t have an option to turn off colour-management (which makes sense). I could get around this by changing the monitor profile to a ‘perfect’ monitor. This would effectively turn off all LR’s colour-management functions and cause photos to display identically in all my programs. It’s frequently described as heresy.

I’m a bit stumped by this. I’ll have to stick with Picasa for the time being.

This was harder than I expected. Here’s the trick: create a new text file in Notepad, and copy this into it:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file as “Show Desktop.scf” (enter the quotes to force notepad to save it as an .scf), then drag it to the Quick Launch bar.

I just came across this impressive piece of corporate-speak:

 As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we at IRIS are committed to assisting you to achieve the transition from XP (or older operating systems) to Microsoft Vista when you are ready to make the move.

However we recognise that the launch also co-incides with the busiest time of year for many customers (self-assessment/ payroll year end). So we have decided to phase the introduction of Microsoft Vista compatibility into IRIS software over a period of some months to enable us to make this transition easier for you.

Aren’t they nice? They’ve seen that I’m doing other things, so they’re kindly ensuring their software won’t work with any new computer. It’ll be less hassle for me, you see - I won’t have to worry about setting it up, doing actual work, or anything.

I can’t help admiring the optimism, though.

I increasingly loathe Tiscali. I’ve been struggling with their email systems for literally years, with all sorts of different problems. Their website is also extremely frustrating to use and seems unable to deal with completely un-paranoid cookie settings, requiring multiple logins to navigate account information. There’s also their webmail system, which logs you out after fifteen minutes of inactivity¹. Typing an email = inactivity, and if take any longer than that to compose a message it’ll throw you out without any option to save.

Recently a friend of mine’s email address topped working. Emails to her bounced back with ‘unknown user’, and she could no longer login to webmail. She was still using Tiscali’s service, and her account was still fully active, working in other ways, and indicated the email address was still valid. At a loss, I emailed their support desk. I had a reply the next day giving me the standard troubleshooting regarding logging into webmail. I replied, emphasising the ‘unknown user’ error that suggested they had a problem with their system, and just received this:

I understand from your email that emails sent to [removed] are bounced back and you are facing logging problem in webmail. Also when trying to connect Outlook Express you get invalid username and password message.

Please ask the sender of the emails to check if he/she has blocked your email address, if found that it is not blocked than you need to report this fact to the Abuse Team at abuse@tiscali.co.uk.

Makes no sense. How would the sender blocking the email address result in a bounced message? And why would the abuse team care? I’m going to try to talk my friend into changing to a gmail account.

1. or thereabouts, it’s hard to find an exact number [↩]

Sensible things to do at 2330 probably don’t include upgrading blogging software, but the new Wordpress 2.1 release has so many whizzy bits that I’m itching to try it out. Immediate notables include:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again [hooray!!]
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions
• Completely redone visual editor [wonder whether it's any more user-friendly...]
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster.
• New version of Akismet.

Plus over 500(!) bug fixes. I’ll take the blog down while I upgrade, just to be safe…back in a bit, hopefully.

Update: All done. Looks most swish so far. I’ll properly try it out tomorrow, but the visual editor immediately seems far superior. The whole thing feels much snappier too, but that could be my imagination.

Quick version: If you’re having problems with ’svchost.exe’ stalling your computer at Windows startup, it’s possible it can fixed by disabling Microsoft Update, at least until a fix is released. This can be done by going to the Windows Update link in Internet Explorer, selecting ‘Change settings’ on the left, then running the the uninstall option at the bottom. This still allows automatic downloading of standard core Windows updates, but not for Office. This is not the same as disabling all Windows updates in the control panel, which is a bad idea. I’ve used this fix on three computers in the past day and it’s fixed the problem on them all.

Longer version: For a few months I’ve been seeing computers stall at Windows startup (and other occasions, such as when loading IE) for minutes at a time. Mouse-clicks stacked up and were run all of a sudden once svchost decided it was done chugging. The task manager revealed only that ’svchost.exe’ was taking up 100% of the CPU, which was unhelpful. ‘Svchost’ is a generic container for Windows services - the background programs that *should* be of little interest to the average users. A little investigation (I got sidetracked by thinking it was linked to iPods for a while) and some googling finally turned up links to this Microsoft KB article, which accurately describes the problem. The high cpu usage is apparently caused by the Windows Update service, and seems to be widespread. A few forum posts indicated it was Microsoft Update causing the problem: MU is an optional upgrade that monitors Office (and other Microsoft programs?) for updates, rather than just the core Windows files monitored by the standard Windows Update. The WU website asks if you want to install MU on every visit, and I expect many people have (I do by default).

Microsoft apparently have a hotfix for the issue, but are still testing it for public release. I hope they get a move on - there must be people who’ve spotted that the problem started after they enabled updates, so have simply disabled Windows updates entirely in the control panel. You can live without automatic Office updates for a while, but core Windows updates are just too important. It can be hard enough convincing people to turn on automatic updates in the first place, too.

These blogs seem to be tracking the issue, and one suggests there’s a public hotfix coming in the not-too-distant future. Hopefully it’ll be automatically applied.

Anecdotal evidence suggests it must be very difficult to write decent backup software, given that I’ve never found anything that works very well. For the past couple of years I’ve been using Acronis True Image, and it’s proven invaluable when creating disk images and is great for transferring data around generally. Its backup feature, however, leaves something to be desired.

A while ago I set it up on a client’s server and configured it to create a ‘full’ backup drive image once a week, plus a nightly incremental backup with just the day’s changed files. Using these seven files I would be able to restore any file from the past week, and the entire drive image if necessary. It worked well until last week when the main hard drive started to report bad sectors.

Trueimage popped up a question at the first sign of a bad sector. It was having trouble reading the data, did I want to retry, ignore, ignore all or cancel? I’m glad it made me aware of the problem, but I can’t find an option to always set ‘ignore all’, and every night’s backup therefore stopped after five minutes, requiring manual intervention at midnight¹. There’s also no way, as far as I can see, to set a timeout on the sector failures, and as more areas died the backup progressed less and less even with ‘ignore all’ manually clicked².

This was irritating, but shouldn’t have been much of a problem. My original plan was to grab the seven backup files and use a different machine to restore the last successfully backed-up drive image onto a replacement drive (the important and daily-changing data files are backed up independently, and I could restore them at the same time). This way I could quickly swap the replacement drive into the server with only a few minutes of downtime. However, the last weekly ‘full’ backup failed to complete due to sector errors, but True Image had already deleted the last successful one. Without the full backup the incremental files aren’t much use, and most of them failed anyway. So I’m left with seven completely useless backup files, and no data.

All the important files are safe, but having to reinstall and reconfigure Windows turns a half-hour job into the better part of a day. Since dying hard drives are a major reason for having backups in the first place, it’s a shame True Image failed to cope. I should say this is True Image version 9 - it’s possible version 10 copes better, but I’m not paying to find out.

I hear good things about SyncBack. I’ll have to take a look.

1. accountants are up late working on tax returns throughout January, so it couldn’t be set to an earlier time [↩]
2. It would also be friendly to let me know which file(s) is having problems, but it’s possible their architecture doesn’t work this way, so I’ll let them off [↩]

Earlier this week I was working on a laptop with a dying hard drive. There was some minor data loss, but I copied as much as possible to a new drive, fitted it and, amazingly, XP booted without a problem. It spent half an hour chugging away with various hard-to-identify services, and eventually demanded a restart. Unfortunately it then crashed at the welcome screen with the classic ‘PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA’. This is generally a ram problem, but it coped cheerily with hours of memtest86+ so this seemed unlikely.

Given the possible data loss I’d normally run a repair install of XP at this point. The recovery cd was long gone, but it’s still possible to repair with the correct XP CD. Unfortunately ‘correct’ was problematic. XP has two different versions, Home and Professional, and each comes in three flavours: retail, upgrade and OEM. The CDs are, as far as I know, exactly the same apart from one file specifying which flavour the cd contains, and you can only run a repair install using the exact flavour of the original install. I suppose this is an extra security precaution, but given that you have to enter a valid (flavour-specific) product key it seems rather superfluous. This particular laptop had XP Home Upgrade installed, and I didn’t have one of those to hand. It’s possible to make one by extracting and changing the differing file on an alternative flavour (perfectly legal, as you still need the correct product key), but it’s a fuss. I figured I’d see whether there was an easier solution.

Safe mode worked, and showed the BSOD was at least leaving ‘minidump’ crash files. Unfortunately analysing one indicated the problem was with ‘ntoskrnl.exe’, which is way too general to be of use. The error logs didn’t help either. I uninstalled a few possible candidates without any luck, and was running out of ideas until I saw the ‘enable boot logging’ option in the F8 startup options. This records startup information to the ‘Ntbtlog.txt’ file in the Windows directory, and has never been all that much use in the past, but I enabled it anyway, let XP crash on a normal startup and checked out the file in safe mode. It listed all the running services, but anything related to Symantec was surrounded by question marks. I ditched the installed Symantec Client Security¹, and everything started working! I think this is the first time boot logging has solved a problem for me.

This is probably a bit specific to be of use to googlers, but I thought the boot logging thing was worth writing up.

1. actually I disabled the services as Windows Installer doesn’t work in safe mode - this is annoying [↩]

I headed over to Walsall yesterday afternoon. I’d been asked to upgrade an ME machine to XP, and there were a few smaller problems on a different PC. I was planning to stop at PC World to buy an XP upgrade, but realised that I’d be passing a Currys that was far less out of my way. I walked in and was trying to find the software section when somebody senior-looking passed by:

He: Was there something you were looking for?
Me: Hi. Do you sell Windows XP?
He: We should have that, yes.
Me: Great, I need the upgrade version…?
He: An upgrade?
Me: Yeah, so I can go from Windows 98.
He: [beat] You’ve lost me, I’m afraid. They’re two separate programs. You can’t upgrade them.
Me: Ok, but I have Windows 98 already, and I just need to upgrade it to XP.
He: [looks at me like I am sprouting horns] You just want a copy of Windows XP, then?
Me: …Yes.

He transferred me to another member of staff, who dug around in a cupboard and the first box he pulled out was an XP Home Upgrade. Lucky.

The motorway was remarkably clear and the journey didn’t take as long as I’d feared. The various computer problems turned out to be fairly minor, happily. One had been described as ‘I can’t delete blocks of text in Word’, so I typed some gibberish, highlighted it and pressed delete. Word promptly placed a message in the taskbar that said ‘Delete Block? No (Yes)”, with no obvious way to select either option. This was a new one on me, and after drawing a blank in the options a quick google revealed it to be the ‘Help for Wordperfect Users” setting. Strange.

Thanks to the wonder of Hettie the TomTom I didn’t have to worry about finding my way, but the return journey was dreadful nevertheless. It was pouring with rain at rush hour on the M6, and my brain was a little frazzled after three hours of upgrading and reconfiguration, but didn’t go too badly until I took the wrong exit off a roundabout. Hettie was calmly telling me to turn around, but somebody behind me decided that despite heavy rain, darkness and the speed limit, I should be going faster. It was too busy for him/her to overtake, too dark for me to see turnings / laybys far enough in advance to pull in, and too wet to have much time to look anyway. That lasted about ten minutes, during which time I got myself more and more worked up, until I finally ditched the guy when the road split into two lanes. Hettie then, as ever, cut across country using the smallest wombat trails she could find, but did bring me out onto a main road within a mile of Stratford, which was quite impressive. I arrived home at 2000, realised that the last thing I felt like was waiting half an hour for a pizza to cook, so went to Burger King. Not healthy, or even terribly warm, but sometimes it’s just the Thing To Do.

I’d managed 700 words before leaving that morning, and another thousand seemed like a daunting prospect. It took me an hour to settle into a rhythm, but by one o’clock had reached 2300, my highest daily total so far. I’m still behind the recommended total, but slowly catching up. I find it easier to write when it’s late, although I can tell while doing so that the quality isn’t up to daytime standards. Ah well, I’ll fix that in the edit

I was hesitant to upgrade Firefox because I knew it would break some extensions, but the supposed speed and security improvements were tempting so I went for it anyway. It installed quickly, and on first run checked all the extensions, automatically disabling / downloading new versions as necessary. This Just Worked, happily.

Is good. It seems faster than 1.5. I tend to have 15-20 tabs open at any particular time, which sometimes slowed down FF1.5 considerably. FF2 seems to handle them without a problem, which is great. Page loads seem subjectively faster, but I’m aware there are plenty of other factors which could be fooling me there. FF2 looks much nicer than 1.5, too. I always thought the default theme was ugly and never found anything much better in custom themes (with the possible exception of the Opera theme, but that caused problems with Options dialogs). The new silver / grey theme looks much classier, imho.

Most of the broken extensions had alternatives:

Tab Mix Plus - adds many useful options to FF’s tabbed browsing feature, such as a maximum and minimum tab size, multiple lines of tabs instead of a scrolling bar and close-tab buttons in reasonable locations. The official version isn’t yet compatible, but the Release Candidate seems to work ok, despite a couple of bugs with re-ordering tabs.
Resizable textarea - allows any text field to be resized, and comes in useful surprisingly often (particularly on blogger.com comment boxes). A compatible version can be found in the comments here.
Compact Menu - removes the pointless ‘File, Edit’ etc. menu bar and replaces it with a drop-down list which can be placed next to the address bar. Not updated for FF2, but there’s a compatible version available here.
Paste and Go - just a little thing, but one-click pasting and loading of URLs is surprisingly pleasing. The old version has been replaced with Paste and Go 2.

Other favourites, such as Auto Copy, CoLT, dragdropupload, Googlepedia and FlashGot, were updated automatically.

I can’t think of the last time a site was broken in Firefox. I think this is probably to do with the great rendering engine, although it’s possible that most of the sites I visit these days are the kind that design for FF anyway. I have the occasional problem with Windows Media Player files refusing to load, but that’s all. It’s easily a full IE replacement. I don’t have any actual problems with IE7, but extensions make FF2 the more productive of the two.

After five years of version six, IE7 was released today. Notable new features:

• Tabbed browsing
• Built-in RSS reader(!)
• Proper printing (more of a bug-fix than a feature, if you ask me)
• Improved interface
• Built-in search box (that can use google!)
• Settings protection, which should help prevent spyware drilling itself into the browsing experience

and for us geeks:

• Extensions a la Firefox. They’re not so user-friendly, but nevertheless it’s a great addition imho
• Major CSS improvements - hooray!
• Alpha channel PNGs - transparency without the 256 colour limits of .gifs
• Faster AJAX - great for all the web 2.0 sites

Plus a bunch of behind-the-scenes security improvements. In November IE7 will be pushed out as a high-priority update to Windows Update users, which includes most people on XP. Yikes. I think it’s a good move in terms of security (and us web-page designers!), but it’s quite the change for people used to IE6. I wouldn’t like to be manning the MS support lines that week.

I’ve been using the release candidate version for a few weeks and actually think it’s very good. It’s much faster than IE6 (or an extension-laden Firefox, although that’s not a fair comparison) and the tab support is decent, although I’d prefer them to run onto multiple lines instead of scrolling sideways. Gmail is noticeably snappier, possibly due to the built-in ajax support, and moving between tabs is effortless. RSS is a slight letdown - you can’t actually view the feed content without visiting the site - but is better than nothing and should help introduce the concepts. I’m really in no place to judge how confusing tabs and RSS will be to the average user, though. Personally I can’t stand going back to tabless browsing, but I’ve shown Firefox to people who’ve reacted with a resounding ‘meh’. All the windows are already at the bottom of the screen, so what’s the point of tabs? I had to resort to ‘it’s just better because it is’.

I’m unlikely to switch completely from Firefox to IE7 as the former has extensions that are just too useful. But it should make using other people’s computers much more pleasant By a curious coincidence, Firefox 2.0 is due out any day now. It’s more of an incremental upgrade, and does break extension support, but is a worthy competitor.

You might want to give it a couple of days to let any show-stopping bugs get fixed, although the extensive public beta testing makes this unlikely, but it’s definitely a worthwhile upgrade, imho.

There is a version of Linux designed exclusively for Christians. Based on the popular ‘Ubuntu’ distribution, it’s much like your normal Linux package except it comes with bible study software, powerful parental controls and a REALLY loud alarm that goes off at 0600 every Sunday.

That last one was a little joke. But not actually my joke. There’s a whole site full, and many of them only make sense to linux admins. Those that I get are quite funny
It looks like Ubuntu Christian Edition’s parental controls actually filter websites by specific phrases. Probably things like ‘war in the middle east’, at which point the computer pops up a huge bunch of pivot-table spreadsheets to help you look busy. It’ll also randomly demand you prove yourself worthy of the OS by deleting a file of its choosing. Sometimes it’ll give it you back, sometimes it won’t. There aren’t any status bars or egg-timers, and daisy-chaining USB devices is a definite no-no. It comes with a virus scanner, which happily never requires updates - in fact the entire source code is locked down with no need for service packs - and there’s a built-in firewall.

UCE isn’t designed to be networked, however. Most installs will try to upgrade attached computers, with particular attention paid to smaller devices such as iPods or mobile phones. It also has a habit of demanding its own subnet in the larger network. It will automatically launch DoS attacks against Ubuntu Islam Edition (which it conflicts with even if installed on a separate partition), as well as rival distributions which actually have only minor source code deviations. It does come with a large amount of decent software that’s also compatible with Windows and Mac OS X, but to be frank the UI is full of unnecessary clutter that leads nowhere, as well as a fair few elements you simply have to ignore if you want to remain productive.

The kernel does, on the face of it, seem to cause a lot of problems, but advocates will point out that they’re actually caused by unrelated things such as drivers, hardware and legacy code, and criticism of the overall OS is just unfair. Especially when it’s by people who aren’t linux administrators - you need to understand the processes, you see, and that’s not possible without training in the kernel. And, you know, Windows 98 crashed too.

One last feature: when uninstalled it comes back after three days.

(ok, the final one wasn’t mine either)

Office 2007 will disable the Insert key by default. This can only be a good thing. If you want to save a document - surely the most common operation after entering text - you have to hit CTRL-S. Printing? CTRL-P. But if you want to completely break all normal word processing behaviour and enter a mode in which any text directly overwrites existing content you need only miss ‘delete’. Disabling this most useless of keys must be a good idea. You’d think.

I told this to my parents. They gave me a strange look. I deduced that they had no idea what I was talking about, so fully explained the full horror of the Insert key, and that over a decade it must have wasted literally centuries of time as people tried to understand why Word suddenly didn’t work any more. I finished, happy with my explanation. They gave me a strange look. “But we use that all the time”, they said.

My parents are the only people in the world who find the Insert key useful. They do some kind of copy-pasting from some funny program and something something something. I forget. My brain rejected it as craziness even as I was listening. If they ever upgrade to Office 2007, I’m going to have to re-enable Insert. That’s going to hurt.

Last week I was working on a network connected to two adsl lines - one standard internet connection and one secure connection to another company - and needed to configure the computers so that specific external requests would be made through specific lines. The IP addresses were too broad to simply add entries to the routing table, so it had to be via URL. The obvious way is via a proxy server, but I have no experience with that kind of setup and the company in question probably wouldn’t be amenable to the inevitable downtimes while I tried to figure it all out. In the end I used a proxy configuration file, which consists of a small javascript function, for example:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
     if (shExpMatch(url,”*.bbc.co.uk/*”))     {return “PROXY cabbages.com:8080″;}
     return “DIRECT”;
}

The browser checks the config file for every URL, and uses a proxy of cabbages.com for every bbc.co.uk URL while using the default settings for all others. I could use this to link to a proxy server on the secure line. This worked well, except that Internet Explorer’s proxy config file path setting doesn’t support UNC formats like \\computer1\files\proxy, so I couldn’t simply host a ‘proxy.pac’ file on one computer and have all the others link to it. I didn’t want to set up and configure an IIS server just for this, and equally didn’t want individual files on each computer as any changes would be difficult to implement. Eventually I discovered that IE does support UNC in the form of:

file://\\computer1\files\proxy

Which looks silly, but works Unfortunately Java, which gets its proxy info from the browser, doesn’t understand such a string, so I had to manually set a proxy in the Java config and hope that Java would only be needed on certain websites (could backfire, this).

I may need to set up a proper proxy server if it becomes any more complex, but for simple tasks a proxy configuration file seems to work well.