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Saturday, October 8, 2005

Tech News

An International body is set to take over the administration of the Internet.

Woden adds: Level3 and Cogent are back on speaking terms according to Cogent’s site after a peering dispute. The outage took Libsyn off the air for the last few days.

For a great history of the Internet, read Katie Hafner’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late.

Another source for history of computers, networking, and the internet is PBS’s 2 3 part documentary series by Cringely “Triumph of the Nerds?” which is the development of the computer, as we know it, and “Nerd 2.0″ which is the development of the internet. Interviews with all the major players and many minor players. Fast movinging and very informative. They can be found on www.pbs.org

b-dawg adds: There is some debate as to how the internet started. There is possibly a very under-recognized man in Europe that may be responsible. Wikipedia has a great artical at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

11a-Noon

Dale in LA - can’t delete “busy” file

Use Unlocker or MoveonBoot.

Jeff in Santa Ana adds - Cedrick Collomb (author of Unlocker) has a nice comparison chart of 20 similar utilities. (If you don’t have a browser from Mozilla and the NukeAnything plug-in, the stupid pop-up frame may make it difficult to read.)
Note: Unlocker is spec’d to run under Win2k & XP only.

Jason in Munising - turning a PC into a telephone

For the caller from Michigan wanting to merge phone and computer audio, I like the Andrea Electronics switch box at http://www.andreaelectronics.com/Buy/ProductDesc/PCTI3-way.htm It still requires a separate phone but eliminates any of the quirks associated with trying to kludge phone and PC together.

When I need to use the phone and computer at the same time, I use a program called Phone Tools, from BVRP. (http://www.bvrp.com/ENG/products/PhoneTools/configuration.asp).
With this software, it supposedly only needs a 56kbs modem (I do have a data/fax/voice modem).

Frank in Phoenix!
I just finished listening to the podcast(2 weeks later) but if you have’nt figured it out yet here’s an idea. Use call forwarding on your land line and forward to a SKYPE IN phone number. You’ll have the extra expense of skype but it’s pretty reasonable.

Marilyn in Alta Loma

Take a look at CallWave it may give you what you want. http://www.callwave.com

Noon-1p

Al in La Habra - Recovering a dead hard drive

If you can mount the drive (he can) back it up first using Ghost, then try the usual recover tools: the free PC Inspector, Norton SystemWorks, and the king of the hill, Spinrite.

Diane in Burbank - how can I do a Million Dollar Web Page?

I wish there were some formula. The guy who created the Million Dollar Home Page has made over $300,000 in three weeks, but it’s just good luck. No one knows what causes Internet fads, or where the next one is coming from.

Sue - buying a notebook for Fortran

Consider a Mac - it’s a great comptuer for programmers, unless you want to do native Windows development. It comes with an excellent IDE with support for bash, ruby, python, perl, Objective c, c, c++, and there’s a fortran compiler, too.

MechMan adds: Dell and Gateway were having a sale on laptops this past week. Otherwise, I reccomend www.uBid.com It’s an auction site, but the units are usually new or only slightly used, and are from reputable dealers, which are the only ones uBid will work with.

Rishabh in San Jose - Chaintech c-box 3 crashes Windows Media Player

It’s probably the USB connection. You can leave those connectors off the motherboard, or better yet, run Microsoft’s autoplay repair wizard. You should also check the Autoplay settings:

1. Open My Computer.
2. Under Devices with Removable Storage, right-click the device you want (the c-box), such as a digital camera or CD-ROM drive, and then click Properties.
3. On the AutoPlay tab, click the multimedia content type you want to change.
4. Under Actions, click the action you want Windows to perform when it detects the media type you selected.

Elwyn in Sydney adds:- does anything work in Media Player? or only a certain type of file.
It could be a corrupt codec file. You need to find the right .ACM file for that file type, eg. WMA files are msaud32.acm. Maybe move the possibly corrupt file to C:\temp, and install media player, and codecs if possible.

Joe in Tennesee -

1–2p

Juan in Thousand Oaks - erasing a hard drive with a LiveCD Linux

Knoppix and other CD-based Linuxes have a plethora of erasure programs including the old command line cfdisk, but if you’re looking for a truly useful boot disk for Windows I recommend the free EBCD.

Woden adds: Knoppix can be used to wipe a hard drive. See Kyle Rankin’s post for details.

John in Canberra adds: Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) does exactly this and very well too. DBAN

Steve in Irvine - virus removal

He’s got kernel32.exe and cc.scr - two viruses that need to be removed by hand. MoveonBoot is useful for deleting busy files.

Sean in Burbank - DSL and Cable

Can he create a redundant setup so that if one fails the other will take over?

owine says: XiNCOM makes routers with dual-WAN ports for two internet connections that are always on. XiNCOM products

Chris says Linksys Makes Dual wan port Routers.RV042 & RV084

Matt The Geek says-Hawking technology makes a dual wan port router they sell at microcenter for about $60

David on the 101 - .net Sp-1 won’t install

He has .net 1.1 and Windows XP SP-2 but he can’t install the upgrade for .net. Apparently this is a well-known problem. The fix is to completely uninstall .net:

dotnetfx.exe /t: /c:”msiexec.exe /fvecms \netfx.msi”

Then reinstall. Read the discussion here.

Mark in San Pedro - Remote access to support clients

GotomyPC of course.

eric from manila - try LOGMEIN.com, works well with firewalls and a lot faster than most VPNs.

Anthony in Bellflower - Windows logs out as soon as it logs in

Doesn’t do it in Safe Mode.

JonLoc says :I had a problem like this and used BootVis from Microsoft (they no longer give it out but still can be found on the internet). It will keep a log of everything the system is doing during boot, login and after login. I found out that I had a device driver that was causing my reboots.

tardis3 says: Another suggestion would be to run msconfig.exe when in safe mode and uncheck most programs that start up - as one of these may be what is causing the problem. Also turn off automatically restart from system properties/advanced/startup recovery in case this is preventing a blue screen from appearing when the computer is about to crash. If it does get a blue screen at leat you will be able to diagnose the problem by putting the stop code into google.

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