You’re watching

We’re happy to announce a couple of milestones for our YouTube videos. Firstly, our total views has now exceed 40,000! Wow, that means that 40,000 people have looked at what we have placed online. Secondly, our most popular video, about getting started with Microsoft Virtual PC, has now been viewed over 6,000 times. Remarkable.

If you have watched our videos then we thank you for taking the time to view our content. As always we encourage people to send us feedback (good and bad) on our offerings. Regular viewers will be happy to know that we have recently purchased Camtasia Studio Version 5 and all our new videos will be using this fantastic product. At the moment we are just working through the product tutorials so we understand how to get the most from the product. With all the new features of Camtasia we hope to make what we present much slicker and more professional.

A recent comment on one of the videos raised an interesting point. We were asked why we solicit for donations in our recent videos. The answer is that these videos are not generally done as part of our normal business, they are done we get a few spare moments. Unfortunately, these days we have to put priority on work that provides us with revenue that pays the bills. If we were to get some revenue from these videos (no matter how small) then we could spend more time developing more videos, improving the number and content of what we provide. So if you like what you see and want to see more then we would appreciate a donation via http://donation.saturnalliance.com.au and help us. It doesn’t have to be much, even a few bucks does help.

We also have be toying with the idea of sponsorship on our videos, again to raise some capital to improve our offerings. If you know a business that may be interested in sponsoring one of our productions please contact me (Robert Crane – director@ciaops.com).

The bottom line is that the videos we do will continue to be produced and placed online for free but they will continue to be done as they have been, in an ad hoc manner, when we have time. However, to everyone who has taken the time to view our videos, provide comments, ratings and feedback we thank you very much and hope that you’ll keep watching.

Another great FREE utility

Well no so much a utility as a setting I suppose. What is it? It is OpenDNS. What does it do? It allows you to point your DNS to much bigger, faster, better featured, highly reliable, etc service for retrieving the domains you type into your web browser. Why is it better? Well apart from being all the things I just mentioned it allows you to monitor all your DNS requests, for all your networks from a web console (cool). Also, it can be configured to prevent requests to phising and “adult content” web sites. This means that if a user inadvertently clicked on an email that contained a link to a phising site (to obtain their banking details for example without them knowing) then the request would be automatically dropped and the user would get a nice warning page.

By using OpenDNS on your network you’ll ensure that not only will your users get a faster response to their request for web sites but they’ll also be better protected. Even better you can access all you DNS statistics from a web console and lots more features. To cap it all off OpenDNS is TOTALLY FREE! So there is no reason not to use it.

Take a look at OpenDNS and I think you’ll find that it has plenty of really cool benefits for a price that is hard to match.

Don’t believe Windows Vista ain’t selling?

Heard recently that last year PC (excluding Macs) manufacturers shipped 260 million PC’s. Microsoft also announced that in the same time frame it sold 88 million copies of Windows Vista.

Say what??? 260 million PC’s and only 88 million shipments of Vista. But wait it get’s worse for Microsoft. It is my understanding that the 88 million shipments of Vista include upgrades (ie not destined for new hardware anyway).

Now Vista does have some excellent features that do make it a worthwhile purchase BUT for the average consumer it means they are going to HAVE TO buy new MORE POWERFUL hardware to run Vista on. Strangely, most consumers ask WHY? To them apart from the flashy Aero interface (which is a resource hog anyway) what benefit makes it worthwhile now? NOTHING! They’ll just wait until they upgrade their PC in 3-4 years and get it then. If we go into recession then this may blow out to 4-5 years.

In my books another mistake from Microsoft not looking at what customers ACTUALLY WANT rather than telling them WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE. The market has spoken Microsoft and I certainly hope you are listening. But ….

Look what I found out after I…

Have been apply Office 2003 SP3 in swaths across customers while they are all away being merry and I can access every workstation unrestricted. That was until I found this blog post! Turns out that by installing Office 2003 SP3, the ability to open and save older legacy file formats will be blocked. Hmmm…why? The reason for this decision is strictly for security reasons. Some older file formats including some from Microsoft are insecure and do not satisfy new attack vectors that hackers can use to execute malicious code. The decision to block the formats is strictly to protect your machine from being compromised. Hmmm…the old security excuse eh? I wonder how many of my customers this is going to piss orff? Hopefully, not too many!

If you need instructions to re-enable certain file formats, please read this article KB 938810. It involves registry modifications so, as usual, backup your registry before altering. GREAT! Another fantastic Microsoft solution – HACK THE REGISTRY! Is there ever a solution that doesn’t involve this for pity’s sake??

Hmm…sounds to me like Microsoft wants everyone to upgrade to Office 2007,

Because it is better? Because the ribbon interface makes using it so much better? Or because Microsoft needs the cash? I wonder!

When will company’s like Microsoft start looking at this sort of stuff from what is best for the customer? Not while they have stockholders I’ll bet!

2 worthwhile utilities

Ok, let’s start off the New Year with 2 interesting and helpful utilities.

Firstly IEPassview – This utility will allow you to display all the passwords stored by Internet Explorer. Yes, that’s right boys and girls, all those passwords for login to protected sites and things like ADLS routers.

IE PassView utility can recover 3 types of passwords:

AutoComplete Passwords: When you enter a Web page that contains a form with user/password fields and a login button, Internet Explorer may ask you if you want to save the password, after pressing the login button. If you choose to save the password, the password is saved as AutoComplete password.
Be aware that some Web sites (like Yahoo login page) deliberately disable the AutoComplete feature, in order to avoid password stealing by other users.
HTTP Authentication Passwords: Some Web sites allow the user to enter only after typing user and password in a separated dialog-box. If you choose to save the password in this login dialog-box, the password is saved as HTTP authentication password.
FTP Passwords: Simply the passwords of FTP addresses (ftp://…)

Next WindirStat – will calculate and display disk usage.

WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

This is a great tool for determining what is chewing up all your disk space and then actually going in and cleaning it up.

Best of all both utilities are free for download. How’s that for a New Year’s present?

‘Twas the night before New Year

So did you miss me? Too bad, I’m back anyway! So what was the best thing that Santa brought me this year? Well, apart from the chocolate covered macadamia nuts (which by the way I suggest you don’t eat for breakfast, because you’ll regret it by morning tea), I think that Project Gotham Racing 4 is the stand out.

I’ve been a fan since PGR2 and really like the changes that they have made for PGR4. The real challenge now is the weather! It is certainly something different to be belting along doing almost 200K’s in dense fog. Man you gotta watch out for those sharp corners. I also really like the concept of a calendar for tournaments and having to complete a few events to win the tournament. So far, I think this is probably the best XBox 360 game that I have played. Can I also mention the new tracks in Macau and Quebec? Those hill climbs are cool.

The good thing about driving games are they usually plenty simply to control. I will admit here and now that I can’t really play those button mashing games very well. You know the kind – jump, spring, twist, shoot, dive, in one hundredth of a second etc after which the sequence usually ends in death anyway for me. Take Halo, for example, although not a major button mashing game there are still moments when you get surrounded and have no ammo and all you want to do is run away but I usually die before I find the right button sequence. At least with driving games I know that I’m going to hit the coming wall because I have been travelling too fast into the corner. Give me simply physics any day. Maybe that makes me old but I never said that I was any good at these games, I just said that I enjoyed playing them.

I also like the Xbox’s ability to connect simply and easily to the Internet to upload your player profile and download demos and additional content. I enjoy playing games on the PC but with an Xbox it just so much easier, put the CD in, power up and play! Hopefully when I get enough practice at PGR4 I might even try racing with other humans (shock horror) online.

Hopefully soon we’ll get back to some meaningful technical or business posts here but hey, New Year’s day is still a public holiday the last time I checked. That means I’ve still got a few more hours of PGR4 before I have to bundy back to reality. Till then – CD in, Power on and ….

‘Twas the night before Christmas

Well, not quite, but soon boys and girls. Here’s a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone out there and especially all those who read my blog (hi Mom). Seriously though, if you do read this blog on a regular or even semi-regular basis I’d like to hear from you when you get a chance. It doesn’t have to be anything flash, just a simple “Hi” would suffice. If you do want to go into more detail about the good, the bad and the ugly of what I create, not only here but generally (online videos, documents, etc), then I’d love to hear your feedback. You never know if what you are doing is helping people so feedback (good and bad) is appreciated. So send your abuse to director@ciaops.com and if there is more good than bad feedback then I suppose I’ll keep posting.

Over the holidays I’ll hopefully be making some changes to Supportweb to improve its performance and reliability but news on that after I have successfully completed what I am planning to do (so I don’t end up with egg on my face when it doesn’t work). You’ll now also notice that I’ve added a feed from Goodreads on the blog page to show you the books in my library to give you a better idea of where I accumulate all this useless information from. I like the idea behind the site and how it harnesses the power of the Internet to build a community. If you read a lot of books then I recommend you take a look and link up with my profile so I can see what people who read this blog read.

Again, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all, have a safe holiday and keep tuned for more updates.

Thanks
Robert Crane
director@ciaops.com