Category Archives: computers

Compatibility issues with Windows 7

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Adobe Dreamweaver

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Okay, so I have had Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 for a long time and it worked beautifully until I installed Windows 7. Now it is behaving very strangely. I went onto a Dreamweaver forum, now owned by Adobe, and asked questions about why certain things were not working in Dreamweaver. They all said “Get a later version” and “It’s a wonder it has worked for this long”. Well, I’m not rich, so what now. I’ll have to learn HTML and XHTML afterall. Maybe I’ll download NVU, an open source program said to be like Dreamweaver.

A lot of programs that I have will not be compatible with Windows 7. Apparently, if your Windows 7 is 64 bit, then nothing much will be compatible, but the 32 bit version may be nicer to you. To find out whether your version of Windows 7 is 32 bit  or 64 bit go to Start>Control Panel>System Security>System

I know most items these days are made to be obsolescent in a couple of years, but I don’t think this was the case with computer programs which used to be okay in their time. The makers would not have been aware that computers and Bill Gates would have such amazing operating systems in the future. I mean Windows 7 is better than the security ridden XP OS.

So what do you do as a home programmer in the way of software which becomes outdated?

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The beauty of a new laptop

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Benq laptop

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I’ve been wanting a laptop for a long time. When I went to Sydney to take photos as well as stay with my oldest friend I had to use her laptop to download my photos. My camera, a Canon EOS 1000D, does not have cards like the compact digital cameras do. So once you have used all the space in the camera, you need to download to a computer. So my trips to the country to take some landscapes seemed doomed without some storage device. Hence the laptop. What I bought though was a factory scoop at JB HF. For the techies amongst you, have a look just to see the specifications. It really is a desktop quality to carry around with you.
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Professional web tools for the photographer

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Recently my partner had an interesting experience and I have learned a lot from it too. He was asked by Nancy Morrison to be a model for some portrait photography. Nancy used to be a dancer and then decided to photograph dancers. She has moved on to photographing actors and couples now. Her portraits are wonderful, but she has been able to afford nice lenses and has learned photography very well, it seems. She is now a professional photographer.

My partner did the session and the results are here

Nancy has used a site to create her galleries. It is called zenfolio. As you can see, it costs, but not much. You can try a free trial and then sign up for a basic package, or pay more for a professional package. I’m not sure which one Nancy chose. What’s interesting about this site is that people cannot download the pictures. Not only that, it is easy to navigate and looks attractive.
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My site was attacked

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Google webmaster central wrote to me several times to notify me that one of the pages on this blog had been attacked by malicious software and had therefore been blocked by google. But I didn’t get notified via email. I just stumbled across it. I recommend that you visit webmaster central often.

I asked my host to fix the page and notify me because I need to notify Google now. My host suggested I upgrade my word press platform, so I did that. There is one error, so far. I’m having trouble getting to Post, although obviously I did because here I am.

Since I did all this maintenance I went back to google webmaster central, only to find that SOMEONE else now owned my site. But after I settled down after the panic attack, I realized that my host has taken over in order to fix the problem. Boy, I hope that is it. Then again, that seems to be a bit naughty, don’t you think?

More posts soon when problems fixed.

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Prezi – a visual web based presentation tool

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Prezi is a web-based presentation tool with so much more to offer than Microsoft Power Point.
It has built-in design tools allowing the effects of time, space and movement.
It is free if you only use 100 megabytes of storage space. These become public and have a watermark on them.

You can pay to have the watermark removed and the presentations will be private and you get 500 megabytes of storage space.
The next level of payment allows you to download to your desktop and have 2 megabytes of storage space.

What are they useful for?
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Fireshot – a fabulous Firefox add-on

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If you want to take screenshots of webpages and save them in multiple sizes and maybe also add text on them then you can do this all right inside Firefox with FireShot extension for Firefox.

Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.

I’ve just installed this add-on and it really excites me for some reason. I took a screen shot of this blog. It’s useful for me because it takes the whole site in, not just what the Print screen key can take, which is whatever you can see, but not further.

I have made the image smaller so it fits on this blog.

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Phone scam

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You are probably aware already that there is a phone scam going around in Australia and  don’t know what other countries. I have heard it on the radio and several have been taken in by it.

What happens is that someone rings and says they are a technical support person who is a representative on Microsoft or Windows and they say you have a problem on your computer which is ‘pinging’ back to them. They ask you to go into Command on your computer and give you a command to run and up pops various reds and blues. Or they ask you to go to your Event Viewer. The event viewer is accessed by going to your Control Panel > Administrative Tools and then Event Viewer. Then they offer to fix this (non-existent) problem for  a price. These calls appear to be coming from India but if people ask for a phone number they get an Australian phone with an Australian name.

If you accept you will lose money for nothing AND have more malicious code put onto your computer.

Microsoft will never ring you. Nor will any other software technical support.  If you ask them to give you your computer’s IP address (those numbers you often see), they don’t seem to know them.

DO NOT give these scammers your credit card details or access to your computer remotely.

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The nightmare of the new hard disc drive

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Samsung HD400LD hard disk drive (400 GB storag...
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Okay, so I found that I couldn’t reformat my old hard drive because it was corrupted.

I backed everything up on an external drive. Backing up emails is easy, but restoring them is less so.

I bought a new 1 TB Sata hard drive over the internet.  Sata HDDs are much more common now that IDE drives and much easier to connect. As I installed it, I took photos of the old one within the case so I would remember how the wires went. I can’t find them this minute, because these photos are untitled.

I inserted everything correctly finding where the cables went.   I started installing Windows XP and pressed F2 to see Set up or BIOS. I saw that the new Hard drive was there. I changed the boot up sequence so that the computer would boot up from the Windows disc.

At a certain point the Windows disk would stop and it would say “no hard disc detected”. Installation has failed. I tried every combination of BIOs settings and boot sequences. No luck.

Finally, I rang a tech company and when the guy came out, all was well, except that my version of Windows did not contain the drives necessary for the motherboard and new HDD. So off it went to the factory and 3 days later at came back all fixed.

I’m restoring everything now. Thank God for the password reminders on web sites, because of all the folders in my outlook email account guess which one didn’t restore. My passwords!!

It’s very nice to see updated software from the web though.

So, if your motherboard is old and that only means a few years, then your search on the internet for how to change a HDD (which is easy) won’t bear fruit. If it is newer, it is a synch really.

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My site was hacked

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I received an email from Google to notify me that I had malware on my site. When I went to the offending pages I saw, “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer” No-one could see the information.

What to do?

The email had a link to Webmaster tools (You must have a Google account).

Click on your site

Click on Diagnostics > malware

You will see down the bottom : Problematic URLs

Click on details

It shows suspected injected code. Mine was an iframe linking to an ad.

Now you might be able to find this and delete it, but I just deleted the subdirectory (it was on a second blog of mine)

I changed my password for my FTP program and my control panel where I host my site. I scanned my site: nothing. So someone had accessed my control panel on my server or my FTP program.

I have lost the posts for this blog because I hadn’t backed it up, but luckily I wasn’t using it much. I’m not sure if the bad code could have been easily removed.

So, keep your virus program up to date, change passwords on your FTP and control panel regularly and back up your blog. Web sites are easier to fix.

Get a good firewall.

Good luck!

Oh, once you have fixed the problem you need to get your site reviewed by Google. Webmaster tools tells you how.

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Does anyone really use RSS anymore?

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RSS : what is it? How to read it and how to use it

[I wrote this article some time ago and you will see how old it is now. Everyone uses Feedburner now, but since Google took it over, you need a google account.  Personally I only subscribe to a blog if there is provision for email distribution, as my blog has. Do subscribe :) ]

RSS is the name given to a simple and well-established XML format used to syndicate news. Once a website creates an RSS file they have created a means to allow others to syndicate their news.

The first version of RSS (RSS 0.9) was released by Netscape in March 1999 as a format for adding news channels to their My.Netscape.Com portal.
Then in July 1999 Netscape released RSS 0.91, incorporating most of the features of a format called <scriptingNews>, which was created by UserLand. Shortly thereafter Netscape discontinued developing the RSS
format, however UserLand persisted and RSS continued to grow in strength.
In December 2000, the separate RSS-DEV Working Group released RSS 1.0 and Userland announced RSS 0.92. As of April 2001, Userland is now planning RSS 0.93. Although RSS is not clearly an acronym of anything, different
people have called it Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication at different times.

The lack of clarity in what RSS stands for or which version is the correct one to use can seem confusing to beginners. However these issues don’t need to addressed by a website wanting to create an RSS file. RSS is a very well recognized format, in fact it is often referred to as the most successful XML format to date. Some websites have a preference for oneversion, others create more than one RSS file and support multiple versions and a recent survey suggests that the first two versions of RSS (0.9 and 0.91) are still by far the most popular.

Everyone must have seen one of those orange buttons called XML by now. Why are they being used? I suppose it was in place of newsletters and a way to avoid one’s newsletter being dumped in a spam folder. That’s what happened
to some of my newsletters and they are not spam. It’s a way to make a page ‘sticky’. People will come back frequently. It’s also a way to let people know quickly if your site is updated. They are used most frequently on blogs, which have themselves exploded over the past year.

It’s a good idea to have an RSS reader just in case you see a site which you want to subscribe to, so let’s discuss this first. Most of them have items on them already, but you can delete what you don’t want. There’s the Google reader and another popular one is NewsGator. These are free.

Both readers explain how to get the news into your RSS readers, but the general idea is to click on the XML button or the place where the site directs you to get the feed and then open your RSS reader or aggregator and add that .xml file and the title of the site.

Okay, now you want to put one on your site, don’t you. Not many static sites would do this and nor would any that didn’t have an hourly turnover of new stuff on the web site. So you do, or you want to put it on yourblog.

Here’s a good link to learn from

http://www.webreference.com/xml/column13/index.html

RSS Wizard or Feed Editor or Feed Mix

If all this seems to difficult you can easily create, edit and publish rss feeds. New RSS feeds can be quickly and easily created with FeedForAll.
Advanced features enable you to create professional looking rss feeds quickly.
Existing RSS feeds can be repaired and enhanced with FeedForAll.
RSS feeds generated by other means can be automatically repaired, so that they conform to the RSS 2.0 specification. Existing feeds can be enhanced to contain advanced feed properties.

Ping aggregators to let them know that you’ve created an RSS feed. In order to let the world wide web know that your feed is up and running, you must give them a Ping. This is very easy to do – just go to http://pingomatic.com
and choose the appropriate sites to inform. Select blog related sites if you’re a blog and non-blog related sites for other content. Complete the information and Ping. Another site you should Ping is Yahoo! Simply visit the Yahoo!
RSS submit page and add your feed URL. This will let the big boys know that your syndicating.

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