Archives for February 2014

GEEKNOTE: BOINC

February 23, 2014 By Rob Marlowe

GEEKNOTE: Are little green men watching us? Did ancient astronauts pay us a visit? Back in the late 1990’s, an enterprising group at Berkeley came up with an idea on how to find out if someone else is out there. They started by getting time on various radio telescopes to gather data.

Looking for extraterrestrials in the mountains of data that quickly accumulated was a daunting task that could quickly cost millions of dollars for the super computer time needed. They hit on a brilliant idea: Instead of using millions of dollars of time on a few expensive super computers, what about using donated “extra” CPU time on millions of inexpensive individual computers? Thus was born SETI@Home. Owners of home computers were enlisted to run a program that would download a small data set, run an analysis on it, and then upload the results, all while the computer was otherwise sitting idle.

The program grew in leaps and bounds and it became clear that other computing challenges could benefit from the same approach. They developed the “Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing” (BOINC). There are now some four dozen projects using the BOINC software.

I’m still partial to the original SETI@Home project. The thought that I might be the one of millions of supporters who’s computer discovered an ET signal is cool. I’ve probably got more of a chance of that than winning the Power Ball lottery and it doesn’t cost me anything other than some processing time.

If you’d like to know more about SETI@Home, visit their website at: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

What do you do with your computer when you aren’t sitting at the keyboard?

Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek
Gulfcoast Networking, Inc.

GEEKNOTE: Cell Phone Memories

February 16, 2014 By Rob Marlowe

GEEKNOTE: It has been said that the Internet is forever and there is a certain truth of the saying. You lose control of anything you post. No matter how foolish you may have been in a weak moment, future employers and everyone else can likely pull it up to view.

The same goes for cell phones. The good news is that we can get back your pictures if you inadvertently reset your phone and wipe the internal memory. The bad news is that the next owner of your cell phone can do the same thing. Teens and others prone to lapses in judgement should give that some thought before they take an “Anthony Weiner” style picture of themselves or their friends.

If my cell phone is stolen or otherwise compromised, the thieves will get away with my collection of stained glass window shots from the First United Methodist Church of New Port Richey as well as assorted pictures of my grandkids and similar stuff. That’s about as exciting as it gets on my phone.

Today’s smart cell phones are nothing more or less than hand held computers with a cellular radio built in. You need to treat them as such. When you delete a picture or other file on a computer, you are simply deleting the pointer that tells the computer where to find it. The picture is still there until the location where it is is reused for something else.

With cell phones starting off with 16gb or more of non-volatile memory for storing your pictures, music, etc., there is a LOT of storage space to use before the old stuff starts getting reused.

This past week, my business partner saved all the pictures one of our clients thought she had lost when she reset her phone. I was able to recover a bunch of pictures and important documents on another client’s external hard drive Saturday morning using a program that identifies deleted files and lets you recover them. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a cell phone memory card or a hard drive. The pictures are stored in exactly the same fashion.

If you consider all the OTHER stuff stored in the memory of your cell phone, you can see the sort of problem you create when you trade in your old phone or sell it when you buy a new one. There is a pretty good argument to be made to physically destroy your old phone when you are done with it. We do something similar with old computers. We pull the drives and physically destroy them. The old cases and the other stuff gets recycled, but the drives that store data are destroyed.

In any event, the best solution is to think before you take pictures with your cell phone in the first place. You will want to email them to your personal computer so you can make backup copies.

Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek
Gulfcoast Networking, Inc.

GEEKNOTE: Does Bill Gates Need Glasses?

February 9, 2014 By Rob Marlowe

GEEKNOTE: As we approach the end of support for Windows XP, it is time to consider the replacements for it. Vista, unlamented, is no longer available. Windows 7 is still available, for a while at least (until the fall). Windows 8 / 8.1 is the version that Microsoft is pushing.

Because of unresolved issues with the user interface in Windows 8, we have steered our customers toward Windows 7. Windows 7 is rock solid and is close enough in appearance to Windows XP to make the transition relatively painless. There ARE a couple of flies in the ointment:

The Windows “Anytime Upgrade” from one version of Windows 7 to another is no longer available. If you get Windows 7 Home Premium and need to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional, you are out of luck. Your only “upgrade” path is from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 8 Pro and that upgrade is twice the price of the old anytime upgrade.

The Windows license key stickers (called “COA” or Certificate of Authenticity” stickers) have gone on a diet. For the longest time, they were 2.75″ in size and the key codes covered most of the width of the stickers. The latest Windows 7 stickers are 1.75″ in width and the key code is compressed down into 3/4″ of that! My business partner and I have both been reduced to reading the key codes with a magnifying light and writing down the code before installing the operating system.

I lump this move in the same category as the requirement in Office 2013 Home & Business that you respond to an email before you can install Office with its Outlook email program… The Microsofties have forgotten about basic usability while trying to wow us with fancy features in their latest products.

So back to my original question: Does Bill Gates need glasses? I’m guessing that Mr. Gates is far enough removed from the day to day operations of Microsoft that he has never had to read one of his company’s license keys in years, much less since they reduced the font size to microscopic.

The cynic in me thinks that both of these developments are designed to push up sales of Windows 8 in the face of massive public indifference to the supposed “improvements” (eg the Metro interface) that come with Microsoft’s latest OS.

Windows 8 / 8.1 machines coming from the large manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc) don’t come with a COA license key sticker at all. The license is embedded in the system BIOS. If you’ve purchased one of these, it is CRITICAL that you make a recovery disk set and put them somewhere safe because that is all that will keep your new machine from becoming a door chock in the event of a hard drive failure or an infection that requires reinstallation of the operating system.

We saw our second Cryptolocker infected machine this past week, so don’t think it can’t happen to you. The ONLY solution for a Cryptolocker infection is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows from scratch.

The move to loading the license keys into the BIOS isn’t all bad. I can’t tell you how many systems, particularly notebooks, have come into the shop over the years with illegible COA stickers. In theory, the BIOS license info should be usable when reinstalling the OS.

Microsoft still needs to address the problems in Windows 8 / 8.1, but at least there are some work arounds in Windows 8.1. It is possible to install a third party start button to replace one missing in Windows 8 / 8.1. It is also now possible with some fancy footwork in Windows 8.1 at least to configure the system so that it drops you directly into a desktop view instead of making you deal with the metro apps first. I’m hopeful that the next Windows 8 update, due in a month or so, will address the remaining issues.

The Microsofties stumble, but they eventually seem to figure things out. Have you ever noticed that more or less every other OS release is a keeper?

Windows 3.0 (first widely available version of Windows)
Windows 3.1 (worked)
Windows 95 (okay, but created issues with DLLs)
Windows 98 (worked well, especially the second edition)
Windows ME (who?… Microsoft’s worst OS EVER)
Windows XP (Major change brought problems, but fixed with service packs)
Windows XP, SP2 and SP3 (great OS)
Windows Vista (yech… Microsoft’s infatuation with eye candy cost it.)
Windows 7 (Vista fixed. Name changed because of what a turkey Vista was).
Windows 8 (Another turkey, with much maligned Metro style interface forced on everybody)
Windows 9 (…)

I’m betting on Microsoft to get things sorted out by this time next year.

What do you think?

Rob Marlowe
Senior Geek, Gulfcoast Networking

Archives for February 2014

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