Category Archives: software

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So what do you do as a home programmer in the way of software which becomes outdated?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

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The wibiya web toolbar should be showing at the bottom of this blog. You can add information to it, delete what you don’t want and use it to see your stats. Of course you need to alter the settings to suit your blog or web site. I think it’s great because you can use it and your visitors can use it to easily add a post to Facebook, Twitter or Digg, for example.

It also makes your site look pretty cool and professional. it is a growing application with more and more people using it. Features are added frequently.

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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?
Continue reading →

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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Keyword extractor

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Have you ever wondered why some websites end up higher on search engine results than others? Now there’s a new tool to add to your search engine analysis – AnalogX Keyword Extractor!
AnalogX Keyword Extractor (KeyEx) extracts all of the keywords off of a webpage, and then sorts and indexes them based off of their usage and position. Once indexed, you can adjust search-engine specific weighting factors and keyword criteria to get the best possible view of how a search engine sees your site. KeyEx can load up both local files as well as files off other websites, and even can work through a proxy, and can have separate configurations for as many search engines as you’d like to enter!

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Just discovered Zemanta

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A Splash of Sun
Image by Chris Gin via Flickr

Where have I been? Zemanta is wonderful. It can be downloaded as a Firefox add on. It can work on any blogging platform. It suggests photos (from Flickr) for your blog, tags and related articles from other blogs, including Amazon Books with your own referral ID on them. I love it. See the reblog sign down on the right. That’s what it does also. That’s how I discovered it. I reblogged someone else’s article.

Also it allows you to easily put your link on Facebook, Twitter and Mashable or almost anywhere you want.

And you can apply links to the content of your blog, which are mostly definitions from wikipedia or the URL addresses. You don’t need to code them. They just happen.

Below are some of the related articles.

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TinyFav

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I have tested out the site and you get thumbnails for all your web sites.

TinyFav is a site where you put in all your favorite links, and get one tiny little link back! With this single new tiny link, whenever you go to it, it will randomly select one of the sites you put in earlier to visit, or optionally, display a list of all the sites you entered! This is great for affiliates masking their hoplink URLS, setting your homepage, or when you just want to share your favorite sites with other people without sending them 20 different links!

The other thing which TinyFav does is cloak your affiliate links.

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More on Twitter

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I have examined Twitter‘s search capabilities in an earlier post. I was initially wrong in what I said about its capabilities in this regard. But I still wonder how useful Twitter is. On the surface it looks like a mobile SMS service. You can only use a short sentence or two. You can include a web address, if you want to. When you twit a web page or blog, the URL is a tiny url, thereby disguising the nature of the URL. I’m not sure why this is.

The thing is, some people developed Twitter as a basic unit and left others to make other applications to go with it and it is those other applications that make it more useful. More and more of these come out on an almost weekly basis.

Let’s look at TwitScoop. Twitter concentrates on news in real time : weather conditions, tragedies, deaths, sport results, celebs, movies.  Twit Scoop concentrates on what trends are rising and falling. You can integrate it into TweetDeck. On the Tweet Deck toolbar, you can access Twit Scoop.

Now what are those #hashtag things you see on Twitter. They are for the very cool people who know all about Twitter. They delineate keywords. So I might add to my Twitter post #photography if that is what I am tweeting about. Others can also search that way. They can just put in search #photography. These hashtags can be somewhat annoying, I think and you can still search by subject in Search, but these tags are filling up by twitter users and you have to learn that language. No subject categorisation by a librarian here, but I see the need for one. I mean, what does #journchat mean. How is anyone to know to search for that.

So you have to search for the hashtag currently in use on Search, before using it or not as the case may be. You can just add your own if you want and maybe it will catch on. Might be quite an excerise for anyone with nothing much to do.

To use some of the other applications you need Adobe Air which is a free program and installs when you download Twitter.

Let’s look at Twhirl Twhirl is so you can switch back and fro between multiple twitter accounts. Why have more than one, I wonder. It works with some social networking sites and that’s useful.

Okay, TweetDeck. This one can get content from Facebook. My friends use Facebook mostly. I think MySpace is going out of fashion except for the young maybe. This one is like Twhirl and they are competing at the moment.

So now there is Spaz This one specialises in skins and CSS swapping. People create them and swap them.

Twitterific? You have to buy this and it for Mac users and iPod Touch and iPhone and iTunes. It gets information from social networking sites.

Digsby actually looks quite useful. It’s for Windows. It combines many social networking sites : IM, emails, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, AIM and Yahoo.

I might head off to Digsby I think. Do you like Twitter?

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