Computer and laptop

Time travel possible

2008-03-19T02:19:00.000-07:00

This is an unusual event that occurred during a ping I have sent to a dysfunctional ADSL modem. Here on the movie in the upper part of the screen you can see time values such as -2 ms.

I also made a print screen of the event. By the time i made the print screen the values were as high as -6 ms.

Conclusion - time travel is possible :)

What will happen if someone logs into your Skype account?

2007-11-05T05:11:00.000-08:00

Do you have any idea what will happen if somebody enters Skype, with your account?

With ICQ things are really safe! If your account is opened at another computer you will instantly get an error message at your site. You will be disconnected as well. So whenever someone logs into ICQ with your own account you will know it for sure.

If the same thing happens with Skype, nothing will happen, absolutely nothing! You won’t get an error message you won’t be disconnected. Apart from this each message you type to anybody will be forwarded to the person who managed to get into your account from another computer. This means that you will no longer be able to sustain your privacy!

Of course you should not only be worried if you have something to hide but in general this is a big privacy invasion. One way to prevent someone from reading your Skype messages is to change your Skype password on a regular basis. Changing your pass once a mouth would be a good choice for you if you want to keep your privacy! You can also change your pass just before some important conversation that you would like to stay private!

Keep your conversations private!

Broken laptop screen

2007-08-06T01:37:00.000-07:00

What will your laptop look like if you step over it by accident. Here is a short clip that shows what the consequences of doing that.

The black parts on the screen are permanently damaged. The other part of the notebook screen is in a way beautiful!

How to choose a laptop?

2007-08-03T02:56:00.000-07:00

What should we be looking for when choosing a laptop?

This is a very common question these days. I will try to make your choice easier, sharing with you my experience as a computer professional. Of course my opinion might be not as objective as it should be but even though it is based upon my 10 years of experience in the area.

In order to choose your laptop you have to answer couple of questions.

The first and the most important question would be –

What I am going to use this computer for?

If you cannot answer this question it is still not the right time for you to buy a new laptop and you do not have to read the rest of my advice.

After you answer the question you will be able to choose the size of your laptop.

There are three most common screen sizes:

12 inch display

Usually weights between 1.5 1.9 Kg. The battery of these computers last longer. They are suitable for a mobile computer with a lower productivity! Such computer will be suitable for you if you are traveling a lot. But it will not fit your needs if you work with graphics.

15 or 15.4 inch display

One of the most common displays among all. Weights between 2.8 and 3.2 kg. This machine is perfect for work and fun. You have to be aware that if you are an architect or a graphic designer for instance the display might be just a little too small for you.

17 inch display

Perfect for any purpose. This laptop can be a fine replacement of your desktop computer. Some of the new models come with TV-Tuner and a remote control. On these machines you can as well add a video card in order to fit you needs. The weight of these computers is around 4kg, which makes them not very suitable if you happen to travel a lot. The price is also higher compared to the smaller notebooks. However, another disadvantage is that the battery does not last as long as laptops with smaller screens!

Now that we have chosen the looks of our laptop ladies can have a sigh of relief and we can proceed with the complicated part of the advise!

What we should have inside our laptop?

I won’t be starting another fight who is better AMD or Intel.

However if you have a small budget AMD will be the answer for you.

If your choice is Intel you can spare a minute out of your time to follow the rest of my advice.

Main board and Processor

INTEL have out on the market the following processor model - Celeron, Pentium M, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo. Core Duo and Core 2 Duo would be your choice during 2007. These processors are with two cores (imagine as if you have two processors) and have higher productivity!

Operating Memory RAM

Often notebooks are being sold with 512 MB of RAM, which is enough for Internet, simple text processing, office programs and for small multimedia projects like music, online tv or movies.

If you are a gamer or a graphic designer, or you are using programs that require higher performance you might need to be looking for RAM as much as 1GB at least. If you can afford it you can even be looking for 2GB of RAM

Hard Disk ( HDD )

I recommend you a hard drive with at least 60 GB of space. If you want to process data with higher speeds get a “fast” HDD, which works with 7200Rpm/min.

If you want your battery to last longer you should consider choosing a HDD with 5400 Rpm/min.

So far on the market there are HDD’s up to 200Gb.

So that is about it. I hope this article helped you to choose a laptop!

Google Analytics turned unstable

2007-07-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

During the last couple of days 28, 29 and 30 of July 2007 Google's analytics seemed not to be working properly - showing all zeros regarding the web statistics of many websites.
This is a strange event considering Google's efforts to be the best free online statistics tool. Of course we expect them to update the missing values in the next couple of days but even than it is something that we do not see very often - Google having maintenance problems.
As for the stats war Google seems to be on the wining side (again) and in the mean time they are gathering valuable information about each site and visitor that uses these stats.
Future will tell ус how all that information will reflect on the marketing sector, but until than the stats better start working soon!

Funny WinRar message

2007-06-26T08:09:00.000-07:00

This is what I got from WinRar after extracting a 2.5 Gb file for more than 37 Minutes As you can see we have 00.00.00 time left and 99% of the job done :) That thing stood up like that, before finishing - for more than 10 minutes.

The end of the search engines, as we know them, is near

2007-04-26T06:50:00.000-07:00

While the new web graphics are building their way into the World Wide Web, search engines face extinction. Applications such as Flash, Swish, Ajax and many new upcoming are anything else, but search engine friendly. The new 3D for web format that we expect from Microsoft is yet another thing that will bury the search engines. The reason - is that there is no way to follow Flash buttons or to read text from inside Swish or follow JavaScript onClick events.

There are ways of course that these applications use to output the text messages, so that Google, Yahoo, Live and every one else can index their pages. I have a bright idea of how Flash for instance is doing that. Upon publishing Flash outputs a sort of editable explanation of the graphic interface. After being edited this explanation may differ from the actual contents within the graphics. This means that if Google index that page and put it in their search results, you may be looking for water but you will find oil.

How can the search engines decide what is real and what is not? Which explanation is valid and which is not? There are in my opinion two ways of dealing with such problems. They can either put some human effort in their output results, which means that every page has to be approved manually – which is crazy of course, or they can follow the steps of each one of us in order to decide what is right and what is wrong. Their aim is to put a Yahoo or Google or whatever toolbar in your browser. Knowing your browsing habits will help them determine if one page is such as described or not.

As an SEO expert I can tell you that this is a big problem for the web masters as well. They will have to put a great effort, after creating a nice website, to promote it in an old fashion search engine readable format. That is not an easy task.

For the so called spammers this is going to be like haven. Because they will have the opportunity to manipulate the graphics explanations no matter what the real content is.

What will eventually happen – time will show. One thing is for sure, Internet is about to face a whole new way of distributing information. Many things are about to change and the search engines are to meet a big problem. Is this going to be their end?

Written for pc-software-reviews.blogspot.com by Aaron Smith SEO expert. Boston MA

Google analytics, Awstats and Webalizer statistics reports analysis

2007-04-24T05:15:00.000-07:00

Here I am going to take a deeper look on three of the most popular web stats generators on the web – Webalizer, Awstast and Google Analytics. As you probably know there are some specific differences between the three of them. First of all Google analytics is a third party statistics program which means that you have to install additional code to your web page in order to receive web statistics. As for Webalizer and Awstats you have to install them locally on your hosting machine or ask you hosting providers to install them for you if they have not already done that.

Let’s first take a look at the statistics I have on one site, given me by each webstat engine, considering that all of them are configured to accept each site visitor as a new visitor if he is to return after 1800 seconds prior to his last visit on the site.

Analytics graphics

Webalizer stats

Awstats stats

It is obvious that there are quite big differences in the statistics shown above. There is couple of reasons for such differences to occur. As we can see that Webalizer shows more than twice more visitors than the other two statistics (these are actualy the visits generated by search engine bots). This is due to poor configuration of the Webalizer. To avoid such mistakes you can regard reading this article: Tips on how to configure Webalizer. The statistics shown by Google and Awstats differ with 23% on the 18 and 2 % on the 19. Such differences happen when the page visit is too short. This may stop the Google analytics code to be loaded in time, in order to register the visit. Here you should also consider that Google Analytics being a third party code, installed on you web page, might not be able to give you the information about pictures for instance used on other sites but hosted on yours.

The above examples lean against Awstats being the best way, of these three, to generate statistics. On the other hand Awstats is written in Perl which may cause server problems when working with large log files.

Google gives poor info on the search terms and keywords that led to your site, and does not give you any information on the search engine spider’s craw rate on you site.

Webalizer if not configured gives you almost raw log file analysis. If you take your time and configure Webalizer then you won’t be able to receive any information on search engine crawler’s activity. Webalizer though is working much faster than the Perl script.

So if you are wondering which one of these three will be the best choice, you have to carefully analyze your website configuration, your computer skills and your hosting service.

Written for pc-os-reviews.blogspot.com by Nate Sharon - system administrator.

How to maintain clean Webalizer webstats?

2007-04-18T05:01:00.000-07:00

Maintaining clean web stats on a Unix machine might be a tough task. When you search the web there are two popular tools that can read the access log and give you information in html format Awstats and Webalizer. In this article I am going to emphasize on how to configure Webalizer in order to have accurate web statistics.

The default webalizer.conf file you can find in /etc/webalizer.conf. In some cases, when you are running more than one website on your server, multiple configuration files might be given for each site. For instance, if you have Plesk control panel, you can find the configuration file under /dirofwebsite/ webalizer.conf.

I am not going to give you the man pages of Webalizer, I am just going to give you some tips that will help you to have more accurate statistics:

1. Add/change these lines in you conf file:

AllReferrers yes

AllSearchStr yes

This will put a small link at the end of the section that you are reading. This link will lead you to a page that will show you the full statistics for search strings for instance. The default setting will only give you the most popular 20 search strings. These two lines will give you the opportunity to see all search strings and all referrers, that brought traffic to your site.

2. Add hide referrer lines:

HideReferrer yoursite.com

This is an important line. You don’t need to see all the internal referrers in your site. Here you can also add sites that are your friend’s and you have a very good idea what kind of traffic they bring to you. If you do not add this line your stats will be full of your own referrals.

3. Add ignore site statements:

IgnoreSite inktomisearch.com

This line will force the Webalizer to ignore all statistics generated for inktomisearch.com. That is one very important line if you want to track only “human” visits. In this particular case inktomisearch.com is Yahoo’s search spider.

(otherwise you will get many site like in this example)

Note that here you should add at lest two more lines respective for MSN’s and Google’s spiders:

IgnoreSite search.live.com

IgnoreSite googlebot.com

4. Add ignore url statement:

IgnoreUrl favicon.ico

This way you will force the Webalizer to ignore all stats generated from site requesting the favicon.ico. Note that here you can change favicon.ico with anything you like. Like if you have any

4. Add search engine query takers:

SearchEngine search.yahoo.com p=

SearchEngine yahoo.com p=

SearchEngine search.msn.com q=

SearchEngine google.com q=

SearchEngine google.us q=

SearchEngine google.co.uk q=

SearchEngine altavista.com q=

SearchEngine eureka.com q=

These lines tell the Webalizer to look for queries coming from the specified search engines. Note that here you have to put a new line for each regional Google search engine that you would like to get statistics for. You can add as many lines as you want for each search engine that you are interested in. You also have to know that you won’t be able to distinguish which query came from which specific search engine.

Following these simple tips you will be able to maintain cleaner stats for you server with Webalizer.

Written for pc-os-reviews.blogspot.com by Nate Sharon - system administrator.

Why do Microsoft need 15Gb of free space for Vista?!

2007-04-17T05:41:00.000-07:00

Many of you may remember that when first useful operating systems came out on the market they were about 200 MB (megabytes). Nowadays everything is different.

For instance Linux distributions come on four or even more disks. But we must not forget that they include all kind of packages. Packages like open office, graphic design software, and many other useful features. Also by installing the selected unix distribution you can choose how many features to use, this way you can shape the disk usage on your computer.

When installing XP the required space for the operating system to work properly is about 1.5 GB. The operating system itself comes on a single installation CD of 700 MB. Of course you need to download all updates of the OS which will expand the space that you are using for your OS up to 1.5 GB. As for any other software you want to install you need licenses and free space.

Let’s take a closer look at windows Vista now. Vista requires 15GB of free space to work properly and comes with four installation CD’s or one installation DVD. As many people around I consider myself as a person who knows what 15 GB of code are, and note that the only thing changed in Vista seems to be the graphical interface of the operating system. So we have ten times larger operating system (compared with XP) that will deliver to us the same functionality - that is what seems disturbing here. First I thought, that this might be because Microsoft did try to fix many driver installation problems, but unfortunately I have already seen lots of blue screens during the installation. So once again why does Microsoft need 15 GB for an operating system that does not offer nothing new, except some eye catching features?! I don’t want to imagine what it could be for, but my guess is that a new Microsoft – Google war is to come on targeted ads or maybe someone out there needs free computing power. The future will show us the truth. I am also wondering what the real reasons of delaying Vista’s birth were.

(wow it's transperant)

I wrote this article not to give answers but to ask questions. These questions will probably stay without answers.

Internet is not a free community any more. We are being watched by everyone – Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and so on … Ask yourself how many toolbars you have installed locally on your machine?

Vista nervous breakdown or great graphic experience

2007-04-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

Installing Vista can be a very exciting experience, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Of course, like any new software product all upgrades, updates and drivers are yet to be released. If we set these problems aside, which will most certainly be resolved in the next 6 months, Vista is a very nice product.

On the one hand Vista keeps the original interface for an operating system. On the other hand however, Vista has many changes in the menus, settings and icons. These ‘innovations’ can drive even the most dedicated Microsoft fans up the wall, as they will have to change their habits (pic1 right desktop click, pic2 the new network tab left and right click). For some languages, with phonetic alphabets there is a change in the keyboard layout. There is also a very cute window that keeps on popping up asking whether you are sure you want to make a certain change in the OS configuration and if you do not know how to remove this window, you just might have a nervous breakdown by the end of the day.

pic1

pic2

From an administrator point of view Vista works much better in a network environment. Of course there are the inherent problems here as well. They can be most commonly observed when you are allocating an address over DHCP – in this case it is necessary to specifically assign the DNS servers of the connection (pic3 this problem occurs when there are incompatible routers). Some of the problems with the drivers can also be very frustrating, but overall they are not so difficult to solve.

pic3

In respects of the hardware it can be said that Vista has higher requirements, the simple fact that it is recommended to have at least 2 GB of RAM speaks for itself, if you have less memory Vista will not be able to display all its ‘extras’. These requirements will force many people to buy new hardware (which might be a market trick). It is also expected/fact that Microsoft will stop selling OEM versions of XP and only to offer OEM for Vista (which is for sure a market trick).
Regarding the graphics very few criticisms can be made, for safety’s sake it is too early to make any specific and general conclusions.

Overall my recommendation, if you still haven’t purchased your copy of Vista, will be to hold out a little longer, at least until the first couple upgrades come out. On the other hand if you want your operating system to offer a better graphic experience then go to the store and buy some RAM, video card and Vista sit back and enjoy.

pic4

author: written specially for pc-os-reviews.blogspot.com by Thomas Dall - computer engineer.