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Sunday, November 13, 2005

Tech News

If you think the Sony rootkit copy protection is bad, you should read the license agreement.

First Intel Macs? http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1368.

According to CNET , Microsoft’s security tools will be updated to detect and remove parts of the Sony rootkit.

Crimmie’s Caller Of The Week web site

11a-Noon

Q Alan in Diamond Bar - ESCD is out of date

He made some significant updates to the computer, now every time he boots he has to hit F1 or enter BIOS. This usually happend because the ESCD is out of date. You may have to force an ESCD update by entering BIOS and selecting a prompt to “update system configuration” or the like.

Q Howard in Mission Viejo - eliminating Norton

His new Dell comes with Norton Anti-Virus but he wants to use NOD32. How can he be sure Norton is uninstalled. I think the Add/Remove control panel will do the job. Make sure to get everything that says Norton or Symantec, including LiveUpdate. If that doesn’t work Symantec does have instrutions for manual removal.

There is also this utility offered by Microsoft. Perhaps Leo knows what it does.

Howard writes:
Per their website: “Symantec provides the SYMClean utility, SymClean.exe, to remove Norton SystemWorks files and registry entries that are not removed by the Windows Add/Remove Programs utility.”

It’s actually SYMCLN.EXE — 206,665 bytes, 09/06/02, 12:00:00 — (as of today, 11/13/05.)

Q Adam in New York City - putting an RSS link on my page

He has a blog that automatically creates an RSS feed, but how does he put a link to that feed on other pages. Very simple. Just right click on the link on your blog to get the feed address. Then put a link to that address on any other page. You might want to put an image there, too since people often look for the orange XML image.

For example:

<a href="http://leoville.tv/radio/Site/AllRecentChanges?action=rss">
<img src="http://leoville.com/blog/images/lol/xml.gif" 
border=0 alt="RSS feed" 
title="right click and copy to get the address for my RSS feed!">
</a>

Studio3k Would Like to Know:
Does anyone know how to extract an RSS feed to have the content (say the top 10 articles) to be displayed as a live/updated feed on a separate webpage? For example, I use a blog for “company news”, and want the company news to be displayed as part of our main website under “news”, thus allowing to embed the feed into OUR layout and not a dedicated Blog layout. Thanks so much!

To put the Google AdSense javascript on a page just paste it into the HTML or CSS portion of your site. Those are AdSense links you see at the top of this page.

Q Ryan in Oregon - hard drives are only visible in one out of five boots

Sounds like an underpowered power supply. If your power supply doesn’t have quite enough juice it may have trouble spinning up your drives. That’s because hard drive spin up is the most power hungry thing that happens on your computer, and with multiple drives both are drawing juice at the same time. If you get a better power supply from someone like PC Power and Cooling you’ll get the watts you’re paying for.

Craig writes:

I have to wonder if it’s a cold solder joint on the motherboard that causes a bad connection until the box heats up a bit and a connection is made.

Noon-1p

Q Dianna in Burbank - monitor problems

She changed from a 15 inch to a 17 inch monitor. Both are 800×600 but the new monitor is giving her a headache. Setting the refresh rate as high as it will go will help here. Also make sure you have the right monitor driver. Open the Display control panel, click Settings, press Advanced and click the Monitor tab.

Andrew Adds:

I want to expand on interlacing for those interested. Interlacing is where 60% of the screen is drawn, and then the other 50% is drawn very quickly afterwards. Our brains can’t respond that quickly and we interpret the two frames as one single frame. This was developed to send color TV signals in the 60′s via antennas due to the limited bandwidth of current B&W channels. This kept the FCC from having to realocate bandwidth for color television.

Jayrot Adds: regarding the tiny drop down menu text, you should also check DISPLAY PROPERTIES>APPEARANCE>ADVANCED and then pick “Menu”. This is where you can change the font and font size of the text on all of Windows’s drop down menus. Something may have changed there, completely indepedent of the monitor switch.

Thomas Adds: a sawfer way to see the refresh rate of your crt screen (TV and computer) is teh wave your hand back and forth extremly fast and you might be able to see 15 fingers on one hand and i think this beter then chewing ice.

Q Richard from Fullerton - changing contrast and brightness on JPEGs

There are numerous good free programs for Windows that will do this including:

• Google’s Picasa
• Irfanview
• ACDSee
• GIMP
• Paint.NET Free and supports advanced features like levels.

Pros prefer to use the Levels command to fix brightness and contrast.

Q Brian in Ranch Cucamonga - converting Frontpage web site to work with Firefox

He’s a (supercool) English teacher who made the mistake of designing hundreds of pages with Microsoft FrontPage. Unfortunately, they don’t work with anything but Internet Explorer. Macromedia has a page explaining how to migrate to Deamweaver (a much more compatible web editor).

Burt adds:
I see what the problem is. Frontpage may have caused it, but Brian in Ranch Cucamonga can fix it without having to use another program. Some of the page elements are being hidden in Firefox because he has the z-index value set too low, which is burying those elements behind other elements. He needs to look for the z-index values on his page and assign higher numbers to bring those elements to the foreground.

Mitch adds:
NVU Free cross platform WYSIWYG editor.
iCapture View your site in Safari without a Mac!
As for the the MS Word problems, I think I have a solution. You can use a free application like CutePDF Writer to put up word documents as PDFs.

Jeff in Santa Ana adds - Yes. NVU (pronounced En-View) was formerly known as Mozilla Composer (and before that, Netscape Composer). Improvements are continually being made.
Folks who use the Mozilla Seamonkey suite already have this. It is open source software (gratis and libre).

bruceb adds:
Don’t forget about the free validator service. This will check your web pages, once they’ve been re-done, to ensure that you never have this compatibility problem again!

Students without MS Office can get OpenOffice - FREE!

Jody Weissler of http://Teachtopia.com adds: Don’t forget http://www.neooffice.org.
It is Open Office, but tweaked to allow the OSX user to avoid going into Xwindows.

Dustin adds:
You can also use OpenOffice to convert documents into PDF format for easier viewing and printing.

Deuce: I have created a website for my girlfriend that is a English teacher. www.southy21.com I used Dreamweaver to build it. Once you convert it I would recommend using templates to edit pages. I made templates for her to use so she can change the content but not the design to make the site look uniform, and it works great. On the site there is a link to www.openoffice.org so her students that don’t have MS office can download and use her handouts, or make documents or presentations that she can then view.

Keith adds:
Microsoft Powerpoint and Word compatibility issues and how to get around them.
Contrary to popular belief Microsoft Office documents are NOT always compatible between the Windows and Mac versions of Office. Many of the issues relate to the use of fonts, OLE, and drawn objects. For the English teacher who I would suggest that he limit his choice of fonts to commonly available (i.e. an open font) when creating documents. Next, download a windows version of Open Office for Windows. Open the documents in Open Office and review the document and correct the problems before posting them. What I have found is that Open Office is much more cross platform compatible than ANY office application.

Gentgeen adds:
While listening to the podcast, I was compelled to answer. I see that a number of people have already answered with NVU, and the free validator service. I would also like to add that HTML Tidy! can be used to help clean up the code. Some software has it built-in (like NVU) or you can get the stand-alone version. The HTML Tidy! site even has a link to directions for integrating HTML Tidy into MS Frontpage. ( direct link to directions.)

Dan in Oregon adds:
Microsoft provides FREE readers for Word, Powerpoint, and Excel which work fairly well. Try them out (also, a much smaller install). If you want the kids to be able to edit and resend word documents, save them as rich text instead.

1–2p

Q Jim in St. Louis - using an iPod in a car

His Prius doesn’t have a cassette deck. So how does he listen to his iPod. Two possibilites. You can buy a radio transmitter interface to the iPod that let’s you use your car’s radio to listen. I recommend the Griffin iTrip.

Mike from Monterey - For the 2004 and 2005 Prius there is an aux input device from Vais Technology called a
SoundLinQ Model SLI that will interface 3G, 4G and 5G iPods to the MFD (MultiFunction Display). It displays album and song info and allows you to have 99 playlists and 99 songs in each play list or have manual control of the iPod but without text display on the MFD. You can control your iPod from the steering wheel controls and MFD. It also has a second AUX input but is not interfaced with the MFD. It is a little expensive at $299. As for the IceLink, there has been limited success with the Prius, I don’t recommend it at all. For more Prius info, go to Priuschat and search for VAIS and iPod. Also, the Vais device will work with the 2006 but not display text yet. The company is promising a firmware upgrade though.

Rudy from Los Angeles - I recommend Dension’s ice-Link adapter for your car. I have one and it works great. It involves installation with a direct connection into your car stereo system. You won’t get any radio interference like the system above (especially in a big city). Check out www.dension.com

Bob from Minneapolis - Having used the Alpine iPod Interface I have to say steer well clear of this unit if you have more then a few playlists and a few songs. The interface, though slick and allows you to just stick the iPod in the glove compartment, is slow when more then a few playlists are used. If you are comfortable with quickly navigating your iPod, the much better (and cheaper) solution is to get a Head unit with Aux in. That is what I have now with my Alpine Head unit and I love it. Sound is great and I can quickly navigate through my 3 or so odd thousand songs and about 100 or so playlists.

Terry from Charlottesville - I use an FM modulator which connects to the antenna port of my factory radio. It essentially functions like an FM transmitter, only without the interference. Just set your radio to the same station as the modulator, and you’re off and running. Much cheaper than buying a new radio.

Ellsworth from Los Angeles
Just last week, I tried using our first-generation Griffin iTrip (with our 1st-gen iPod) in a 2005 Prius. Using an iTrip (and most other iPod-connected FM modulators) in Los Angeles is dicey at best - the area is saturated with broadcast stations at every possible frequency interval, and massive RF noise everywhere else. The 2005 Prius’ antenna is at the center of the trailing edge of the roof. We found NO position inside the cabin which produced reasonable results with the iTrip. Even holding the iPod and iTrip inches from the antenna’s location at the top of the back window (pretty hard to do while you’re driving) didn’t result in clean reception - and we tried this at many different frequencies across the FM band. Bottom line - we were one of the first iTrip customers, but it just languishes in our glove box. We use a cassette adapter.

For those without a cassette deck - such as Jim from St. Louis who asked the original question - I’d suggest an FM modulator connected in-line with the radio antenna (this is what Terry from Charlottesville is describing). This was a common solution for adding CD players to cars in the late ‘80s (two decades ago - good grief!). Installation requires unplugging the factory antenna cable from the back of your car’s radio, and plugging a small transmitter between the antenna cable and the radio - an operation which varies from somewhat awkward to extremely difficult.These products require also power - another poster on this page mentioned that Toyota was very strict about electrical changes to Priuses violating factory warranty - so be warned. Both of these operations are something that any car stereo installation department does all day long, if you’re not handy with this sort of thing.

I’ve never used these products, but a quick search located a few inexpensive and promising candidates for in-line FM modulators:

Q Scott in Hollywood - localize the data on a web page

He wants someone to design a website for him that will ask visitors for a zip code and then display localized information. That requires a dynamic site connected to a database. Many people solve this problem with MySQL and PHP, but if you want a consultant to set this up for you I recommend using Macromedia’s ColdFusion. A consultant can create a site for you that you can easily update without any technical expertise.

Q Tom in Minneapolis - can’t get online with Linux

He can’t even get to the router which means that he’s not installing the eth0 interface properly. Try a Live CD Linux to make sure you have a working ethernet interface that’s Linux compatible. If it works then you have to figure out what’s going wrong. Another distribution might do a better job of automatic configuration.

Q John in Laguna Nigel - forgot to finalize discs

He recorded a bunch of stuff using a standalone DVD recorder but he didn’t finalize the discs, now he can’t use them in a DVD player and he no longer has the standalone burner. How does he finalize them?

Unfortunately, there’s no standard for finalizing discs from standalone video DVD recorders. You’ll have to get the same model recorder and finalize.

Q Frank in Alexandria - is my NAS Drive safe?

If it’s inside your router it’s exactly as safe as your PCs. Maybe even more so since it’s a somewhat more limited device.

Q Edmund in Upper Marlboro - uninstalling Norton Systemworks

Check out my advice to Howard above.

Q Barry in Oceanside - external or internal DVD writer

Don’t even consider an external if you don’t have at least USB 2.0. Firewire would be even better. Internal is cheaper, and not too hard to do if you have a free slot for an optical drive. In Barry’s case, he just replaces his old DVD reader with the new writer. Make sure they’re jumpered the same then just use the same cable connectors. Should be pretty easy.

Q Jeff in Laguna Nigel - file compare and protecting your network

To root out duplicate files check out the Show Notes from October 30, 2005.

To merge changes between two files, use the UNIX diff command. On Windows use the DiffUtils.

He also asks, will a software firewall protect my network in case I bring in a laptop that has a network virus on it? Yes - that’s the best reason to use a software firewall. And the XP firewall is adequate for that purpose.

Dustin adds:
WinDiff is a free graphical text file comparison utility for Windows. It is also included in Windows option packs, but if you don’t want to download the option packs for Windows, you can download just WinDiff from the above link.

Juan adds:
Beyond Compare is a shareware file comparison utiility. It has tons of useful features for comparing files. It’s a must for programmers.

Chat Logs and Show Audio

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