Modems And The Day Of The Triffids

You’re probably wondering what the hell modems have to do with the John Wyndham book, “The Day Of The Triffids”, right?

Hopefully, all will become clear soon, but first, a brief summary of this classic science fiction book, for those who’ve not read it (or seen a movie or TV adaptation of it).

The book is basically about two things – triffids, which are plants that can move about, are intelligent, and can kill people with poisonous stings, and a meteor shower that renders all those who watch it blind.

Both of these elements are, of course, bad, but what makes the situation so horrible is that they both happen at once – the vast majority of the population go blind, and therefore can’t see where they’re going or what they’re doing, and the triffids go on the rampage, attacking these blind and defenceless humans everywhere.

The point, to me at least, which was borne out from my many years working in IT, is that while you can plan for independent scenarios, it’s really difficult to plan for combinations of events, such as those depicted in this novel.

And that sort of brings me to our modem issues.

We had been struggling for years with a so-called broadband/DSL service that barely offered 1Mbps downloads, in spite of frequently asking for the 3Mbps service that we’d been offered.

And then, one weekend in December 2011, we had an Internet outage that lasted longer than usual, so we raised a support ticket.

Needless to say, by the time the service engineer came, we’d already got our Internet access back.

Nonetheless, he checked the line into our house and reported that all was OK, and he gave us a new modem to install, saying it was all pre-configured, so all we had to do was plug it in.

A chance comment by me about our Internet speed led him to ringing his office and finally upgrading us to a 3 meg service.

Hurray, or so we thought!

However, from the moment we installed the new modem, we had no end of technical issues, including loss of Internet connectivity, an inability to access our local home network, and sometimes we couldn’t even connect to the modem’s own control panel.

These problems were occurring multiple times a day, every single day, which meant getting any work done was difficult, to say the least.

The only good news was that, when we could get access to the Internet, our download speed was vastly improved, at last!

After trying everything we could think of, we called our service provider again and waited for the engineer to come.

Once again, he checked the line into the house and found no problems, but we did find a phone terminal in our mud room where the wires were a bit loose, so he tightened those up.

Did that do the trick?

No, of course not – that would have been far too easy!

So, I mapped out our phone and Internet wiring set-up for him, as we wouldn’t come in the house for some reason, and we decided to try making a small change to the configuration, as he’d discovered, based on our modem stats, that there was way too much noise on our line, and that the incoming signal was therefore being compromised.

Back indoors, I swapped a few cables around and installed a new junction box, and lo and behold, the noise on the line disappeared.

We thought we’d cracked it, so the engineer left again.

It should come as no surprise that the problems were still with us – not as severe as before, but things weren’t right.

More out of desperation than anything else, I thought I’d try shutting down my software firewall – mainly because I’d run out of options. I didn’t like the idea – after all, we’d installed the firewall for a reason – but we were losing hours and hours every day to these intermittent outages.

And much to my delight, that solved the problem! No more dropped connections to the Internet or to our home network, no random glitches – just a working network and Internet connection!

Finally, we have a reasonable service, although I use the word “reasonable” loosely – we’re still struggling with a 3Mpbs service when I know people who are getting 60Mpbs! But that’s what you get when you live in a remote, rural area, I suppose, and at least we don’t have to rely on a patchy satellite service.

So, now do you see the connection to the Triffids story?

Just like in that book, our problems were not caused by one single factor, nor even two, but by three different issues, all of which were causing us excessive downtime. Fixing any one or two of those problems was still insufficient, and that’s why it’s really hard to test and plan for such combinations of occurrences.

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One Of The Things That’s Funny About Google Is…

… the fact that the Gmail spam filter frequently classifies its own Google alerts as spam!

Doesn’t it know that you have to sign up to receive Google alerts, and that they are therefore unlikely to be unsolicited spammy emails?

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Email Spam

It never ceases to amaze me how many spam emails I receive – every single day.

But what I don’t understand is why I receive some of them.

Let me explain…

When I sign up at a new website, I always create a specific email address that I only use for that site. For example, if the site were called “Make Millions In Seconds” (I just made that up), then I might sign up using an email address called makemillionsinseconds@mydomain.com

I do this to help me filter incoming emails, and generally keep track of them all.

So, here’s the question: how come I receive a ton of emails to address such as the sample one above, as they are only meant to be used for one site (or, in some cases, a number of sites run by one person)?

Are the spammers simply guessing these email addresses? Maybe they’re combining the names of popular websites and marketers with another list of harvested email addresses / domain names? Having said that, it would seem like they guess correctly an awful lot!

Are the site owners selling, renting their customers’ and subscribers’ email addresses? If this were the case, then an awful lot of people are doing this, based on how many spam emails I receive.

Are the companies who run the email and autoresponder services doing the same? I have to say that this seems unlikely, as many of these websites use big names such as Aweber to manage their email lists, and I can’t believe that these companies would risk their business for this sort of unethical practice.

Or is it that too many people and companies are not protecting their data, and it’s just being hacked by spammers with some clever data mining tools?

Of the various options I can think of, this last one seems the most likely, but if you have any better ideas, please leave a comment below.

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Q-Dir – A Great Free Replacement For Windows Explorer

My laptop, which is between one and two years old, is starting to behave in some very strange and undesirable ways.

For example, things lock up (applications or all of Windows), I get the occasional BSOD, CHKDSK starts but will never finish, etc.

And relatively recently, I’ve been having problesm with Windows Explorer, which I use a lot – usually two instances are running at any one time.

One main problem is that the first time I try to run it after a reboot, it locks up most of Windows, and my only solution is to use the Task Manager to kill the explorer.exe process, which I know is risky, and then to use the Run command to open the application again.

In most cases, this works fine – but not always, which then leads to yet another reboot.

And these past few days, it’s been going unresponsive for no apparent reason at random times.

As I need this application to do a lot of what I do, I decided enough was enough and went on the hunt for a good replacement for Windows Explorer (and preferably one that was free).

A quick search on Google instantly turned up a couple of contenders, so I downloaded both and tried them out.

The first was Explorer++, created by David Erceg, and the second was Q-Dir, created by Nenad Hrg.

So, what were the relative pros and cons of each of them?

The good news is that both are free, and both can be run as portable apps.

Explorer++ supports multiples tabs, which is a nice feature, and I particularly liked the Bookmarks toolbar for fast access to folders used regularly. (One of my all-time favourite applications is Folder Guide, which integrates nicely with Windows XP Pro, so I wanted to replicate this funcationality if possible.)

However, my biggest issues with Explorer++ were the strange way it sorts and/or groups folder contents, and it also seems to be very slow.

Q-Dir, on the hand, is very fast indeed, and instead of supporting multiple tabs, it does offer multiple panes, anywhere from one to four of them, which makes drag and dropping of files really fast and easy.

The help information on both apps is somewhat sparse, and at first, the thing I didn’t like about Q-Dir was the fact I couldn’t work out how to use the Quick Links feature (which is this app’s Folder Guide type functionality), but once I tracked that down, it met all of my requirements, and this is the one I think I’ll be sticking with.

So, if you’re looking for a good, free Windows Explorer alternative, my vote goes for Q-Dir.

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NoteTab Pro vs. metapad

A long time ago, in the days when the basic Windows Notepad application was very limited, I looked for a replacement, and found a free app called metapad.

I liked it for several reasons, including the fact that it could handle files of any size, it has more functionality than Notepad while still retaining a very simple interface, and, most importantly, it could actually replace the system Notepad.exe program.

What that meant was that all files that used to be opened by Notepad would now be opened with metapad instead – i.e. no having to reassign default applications to a bunch of file types.

However, with the introduction of Windows XP (I think I first found metapad when I was running Windows 98), the increased system security (?) meant that getting metapad to replace the Notepad app was very difficult, and the last time I had to install metapad, after upgrading to a new XP laptop, I couldn’t get that part to work at all.

Which meant that one of my favourite metapad features was no longer a benefit.

And that, in turn, meant I was back on the hunt for a Notepad replacement that at least offered the ability to take the place of Notepad – and any other additional features would be just a benefit.

Following a recommendation from Derek Franklin, (creator of, for example, The Copywriter’s Brain), I took NoteTab Pro for a test drive, as they offer a free trial.

I liked what I saw – it has the ability to replace Notepad (it’s actually a menu option within the application), it has all of the main features of metapad, and it also supports the creation of what they call “outline” documents.

These are a special type of file that allows you to create structured notes within a single file, useful, for example, if you’re writing a book, where you can create one section per chapter, or if you’re maintaining an ideas file, where you can quickly create a new section (for the idea), and then add a few notes to remind you what that idea was all about.

There are many other features too, including the ability to have more than one file open at once, via its tabbed interface, a multi-line search and replace function, support for RegEx, a built-in calculator, and much, much more.

So far, I’ve been really happy with my decision to change to NoteTab Pro (they also do a free Light version and a Standard version, although their features are more limited) – it’s not free, but it is very reasonably-priced, and it offers more features than most people probably need.

Anyway, check it out – the free version is, well, free, while the Standard and Pro versions both offer 30-day free trials, which is more than long enough to decide it’s worth upgrading to the full product.

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Disabling That Annoying Windows Automatic Restart Nag Screen

While I appreciate that Microsoft is trying to make sure our computers are safe and secure by encouraging people to use their automatic update features, it does have one hugely annoying and potentially dangerous aspect: automatic restart.

After some updates which it downloads and installs for you, it will then pop-up a message to say that you need to restart your computer for the updates to take effect, and you have two choice – restart now or restart later:

There are two problems with this.

The first is relatively minor, but it’s all too easy to click on the Restart Now button when you meant to click on the Restart Later button.

I know – RTFS (if you’ve come across the popular term RTFM then you’ll be able to work out what this means), but as this nag pops up when you’re probably focused on doing something else (e.g. work, playing games), then it’s still too easy to do.

The second is much more dangerous – you may have wandered off from your computer for a while (e.g. to eat, sleep, or other natural functions), and are not there to respond to the nag.

Now, if you’ve gone off and not saved the latest changes to your Word document, then shame on you – I’ve no sympathy.

But what if, like me, you run data back-ups every day (as indeed you should do)? Then having Windows restart your machine in the middle of that back-up job is plain inconvenient and inconsiderate, because you have to start it all over again.

I choose to back-up my Outlook Express files overnight because this particular job takes about two and a half hours, and with it being the quietest time of the day from a business perspective (we offer 24 x 7 phone support to our customers), then it’s the obvious time to do this necessary housekeeping.

Or supposing you’ve started, or scheduled, a massive download, and then you find that Windows has kindly rebooted your machine for you right when it got to 99% complete?

P*ssed off wouldn’t even begin to describe how you’d feel!

So, fed up with the nag screen, I went on a hunt for a solution, and found two things that may be of interest to you.

Firstly, I found a video, although it appears as though it’s aimed at Windows Vista users only:

Secondly, I found a very helpful post on Technize.com, that provides instructions that work for both Windows XP and Windows Vista, with both termporary and permanent methods for solving the problem.

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The Regex Coach

For all but the most die-hard programming propeller-heads, the term “regular expression” is liable to bring out a cold sweat.

True, they’re incredibly powerful …

… but they’re also incredibly hard to get your head around.

So, what is a regular expression (aka regex or regexp)?

Well, in a nutshell (a Wikipedia nutshell, to be precise), they Read more…

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Cool Image Magnification Script

While working on one of our many websites a day or two ago, I found a really cool image magnification effect that I’d not seen before.

Eager to track it down, my first port of call was my favourite site for this type of script, Dynamic Drive, and lo and behold, I found it instantly.

It’s called jQuery Image Magnify v1.1, and it’s dead easy to install (and it works on IE, Firefox and Opera).

Give it a try – you’ll love it!

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Redirection 101

I’ve used PHP redirects to cloak things like affiliate links for a long time now, and I’m therefore a bit rusty on the other techniques (e.g. JavaScript and Meta Refresh).

So, when a guy I’m collaborating with on a project or two asked me how to cloak his affiliate links, I started by setting up a sample PHP script for him, but then when I tried to remember exactly how to use the other non-PHP methods, I ran into a wall of amnesia.

As always in this situation, I turned to Google, and happened upon a brilliant website where you enter the URL you want to redirect to, and it instantly gives you copy-and-paste code you can use in all three formats (i.e. JavaScript, Meta Refresh and PHP).

It’s quick, simple, and means you need to know or understand practically no code at all.

The site is called My Redirect Code, and I highly recommend it.

(BTW, my friend has written an excellent short report called Unlimited Profit Streams that’s well worth a read, and it’s only $7 USD. If you can’t make that back after reading and applying what he teaches, then I suspect Internet Marketing isn’t for you.)

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Straight In At The Deep End Of The Server Pool

Well, we took the plunge a few days ago and signed up for our very first VPS hosting account, after spending a day or two researching suitable candidates.

Our requirements were quite specific, for reasons that are not relevant here, and the sign-up process and post-sales set-up were not without their problems.

However, I should make it clear that none of these were the company’s fault – it was more to do with our lack of understanding about VPS.

You see, I have a fair bit of experience in managing websites using the standard cPanel, as offered by what’s probably our favourite hosting company, Host Gator, but VPS is a whole new world, as we recently discovered – the learning curve appears to be steep.

Firstly, the O/S we chose, ubuntu 8.04, only comes with a thing called Virtuozzo Power Panel, which is fine for one of the reasons we wanted this server, but it apparently meant Read more…

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