Never mind SP1, what about IE10?

Last night my Win 7 Pro laptop was automagically updated to IE10 which broke the 1 thing I use IE for, hosting my office remote access software.

A quick trip to the System Restore sorted that one out but grr. I do so hate it when MS insist on labelling their browser upgrades as "essential" updates rather than optional.

I know I could set Windows Update to show me the updates for approval prior to applying them, but it's still tres annoying.

Zis is Night'awk, are you receiving me?

Mon Dieu!

I cannot fathom how the Reg headline writers didn't think that this story was ripe for a bit of 'Allo 'Allo? I mean come on, given the following aspects:

France

Communications

It could almost have written itself, couldn't it?

For the benefit of readers who don't have a clue what I'm wittering on about, feel free to expand your horizons here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Allo_'Allo!

Some retailers already ahead of the curve...

We recently had cause to pursue a faulty appliance supplied/installed as part of a fitted kitchen which failed spectacularly after less than 3 years of very light usage.

The retailer in question (B&Q) after attempting the usual fobbing off towards the manufacturer (eg "It's out of warranty, why are you annoying us?") finally agreed to refund the purchase price.

That was the good bit, the scary part was when they insisted that the refund could only be applied to the card used by my wife to place the deposit for the kitchen back in 2008. WTF is a retailer doing retaining this level of detail for that period of time? Please don't make me laugh by suggesting that the data is suitably secured either.

Is it really credible that they should be retaining this information on the off chance that they need to issue a refund because they could easily cut a cheque instead.

More of this sort of thing...

What a refreshing change to hear about users that aren't clueless numpties and a switched on IT department.

Openwound strike again!

As with others, my "available date" has automagically been put back by 3 months yet again.

My cabinet is at the end of our road but we're in a conservation area (Chislehurst) and judging by the planning decisions on the council website, applications for the new fibre cabinets are not going well.

In such a situation, you'd think the sensible thing to do would be to not give a date (the exchange was enabled some time ago), except our area is also covered by Virgin as well.

Coincidence do you think?

Repeat after me..

RAID is *not* backup!

Is that what it takes to get a discount out of Oracle these days?

Sorry, can't talk right now...

Hmm, some of those call handling options sound very similar to Profiles on older Nokia handsets

I seem to remember an app on my E61 that would do pretty much everything described in terms of call handling/messaging etc and was location aware (granted via cell mast id rather than GPS but at least it didn't nag you to switch on wifi to improve accuracy ).

Was very useful as it would switch profiles when you got into the office or back home or any other location you setup.

Of course if Apple provided the relevant API access then 3rd party devs could have done the same some time ago.

Full disc encryption goodness

+1 for TrueCrypt which I used on my previous XP machine and now on my current (Win 7 Pro, HP Elitebook) rig.

It will do full disc encryption and can take advantage of AES hardware acceleration found in many newer Intel CPUs to help keep the performance up. Even on a Win 7 install with multiple partitions (boot, main win 7, recovery, tools) you can encrypt the main partition without any problems. Even if you don't have the shiny AES instructions available, the performance is still very respectable.

Continuing the disc related theme, a mention has to go to Clonezilla which allows you to perform bare metal backup & recovery. It will also perform deployments and can use multicasting to boost performance. I used it to transfer my Elitebook from the stock HDD to an SSD and once I'd resized the HDD partitions before cloning to the SSD, the process ran like clockwork.

Another security related suggestion...

Excellent suggestions, I'd also add Secunia PSI to this which will monitor your installed apps and ensure they're kept up to date (in some cases automagically updating them for you). It helps reduce the chances of being hit with an exploit for an old version of a piece of software, especially if they're not good at managing their own updates.

Tumi alternative

A (probably cheaper) alternative to the Tumi can be found here:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/worldwide-travel-adaptor-with-twin-usb-charger-393930

The specs claim it will charge USB devices at 5V up to 1A so you may be able to get away with charging an iPad with this (I'll try this with the wife's iPad when she's not looking)...

Nuke icon in case the experiment doesn't pan out...

Apple TV ++

For a streamer, the ATV2 is a decent bit of kit as long as you take the time to jailbreak it and get XBMC on it.

It has Netflix onboard natively, which on our BE broaband connection performs admirably. Quality is good, even on our lounge screen (a 50inch Pioneer Kuro) and we were so happy with it that we picked up another the last time we were in the USA for the master bedroom. I especially liked the fact that they have parental controls as standard so I can decide whether my 6 year old can browse Youtube or not.

Both of them share a central media library based on our NAS, with the XBMC library updating itself via a nettop PC that gets woken from hibernation via wake on lan and then goes back into hibernation once the deed is done. It did take a bit of tinkering to get it running with the shared library and extras but the process for both this and the jailbreak are well documented online.

XBMC ++

The comments for the Revo et al are valid (I have an R6310 sporting Win 7 which I also run a variant of XBMC on called OpenELEC booting off an SD card) but a potentially cheaper (albeit less flexible) option is to get hold of an Apple TV 2, jailbreak it and install XBMC on it. This will handle just about any format you can throw at it (http://xbmc.org).

I'm running two of these streaming media from our QNAP NAS (wired, not wireless before anyone leaps in) and they work like a charm. You do need some basic command line abilities for the initial setup but the process is well documented step by step on various sites.

The bit I like about the ATV2s is that they're relatively cheap (£99 or $99 across the pond), small and have no fans. The fact that they can also stream Netflix as well (recently available in the UK but make sure you have the 4.4.4 software onboard otherwise don't bother) is a bonus. They are limited to 720p and won't output full hi def but as neither of my plasmas are full HD, it doesn't really bother me.

Can't manage what you don't measure...

I agree that the user experience is important and should be monitored. If possible, you should consider whether it's possible to "bake in" the capturing of suitable performance information from the outset.

One reconciliation system I worked with a few years ago, had the inbuilt ability to record the details of what the user was doing (eg what options they had selected when performing a particular task) along with the time it took to perform and how much information it resulted in). This could then be recorded in a separate database for review/analysis.

All too often the "lone user" performance issue is difficult to quantify "it seems slower than yesterday" with nothing to actually back it up.

Having the details of what the user was doing "Hi Fred, I can see you ran the same report yesterday and it took only 2 seconds longer today..." can be a powerful tool. Once you have that raw data you can start doing more useful things with it (eg is the average time to run a given process creeping up and up over a period and if so, what are you going to do about it).

The view that support folk would like to deal with a significant meltdown in their systems in my experience couldn't be further from the truth. Whilst a frontline L1 helpdesk call handler may not have the time/knowledge/incentive to proactively suggest improvements, if the systems are that complex, they'll be backed up by the relevant L2 application support groups who will have a vested interest in ensuring that improvements are introduced proactively.

At a basic level, it is human nature, if you can do something to reduce the "noise" generated by avoidable support requests then you'll do it. The beneficial side effect is that hopefully the user experience is also improved :-)

Serious home cinema buffs will look elsewhere...

Have to say I'd agree with the sentiments expressed around the UI, but for me that's not the major issue.

A serious home cinema buff will probably have their equipment tucked away in a cabinet (locked if you have sprogs around) or in some cases even in a different room to the actual viewing location.

In situations like these, the ability to have some sort of wireless "extender" that can slave from the main unit and broadcast your IR signals (typically with a collection of IR emitters to stick over the different bits of kit) is an absolute must.

This can do the wireless bit (over WiFi) but no discrete emitters for different bits of kit coupled with a lack of slave capabilities means that this gets a "meh".

@ AC: 08:45

Actually, no, if your master password was somehow sniffed via a keylogger or something similar (remember it's only entered once per browsing session into the FF extension), this wouldn't divulge what options you'd configured regarding password length, whether to use l33t type mangling etc. Not forgetting that you can customise these on a per site basis.

Aside from that, if you have a keylogger or similar running then you have other security issues that you should be attending to.

Password Generators

One option are Password Generators such as PasswordMaker for FireFox.

Given a master password as a salt, they'll generate a hash against the site name and give you a different password for each site. You can choose the length, what range of characters to use and best of all the password itself for the site isn't permanently stored anywhere (on your machine anyway). Instead, the browser recreates it on the fly when you visit the site in question.

OTA 10MB limit still in place?

I've tried pulling down podcasts via 3g (this is on O2 in the UK) to be met with the familar message stating that anything over 10MB has to go via Wi-Fi.

Is anybody else seeing this as well?