36 posts tagged “computer”

Folks, I have a theory.
   After asking on Twitter, and using two different ISPs in two different cities, and trialling different browsers, I have found that in New Zealand, I (and one other Twitter friend) cannot reach our Autocade site without the browser coming up with an error asking one to save the page.
   However, using a US proxy server, there is no problem, and the page functions normally. It actually opens.
   I suspect something is afoot with ISPs in New Zealand blocking certain sites. Can friends reading this confirm this with me, please? The site is autocade.net.
   I remember last month there was quite a bit of furore on Twitter when TelstraClear customers could not reach justinflitter.com (since closed). Again, I had no problem accessing Justin’s site via a proxy server. I simply could not reach it from New Zealand, even though Justin is a New Zealander.

While I can now compose on Vox (not, incidentally, something I could consistently do from Christchurch, either, so we can now conclude the problems were not ISP-specific), is anyone else having problems with the YouTube conduit? I know at least one other user is.
   It gets me a bit worried how things fall down here regularly. But I don’t think we can blame Vox exclusively. I am sure the other site, in this case YouTube, is to blame in part, for perhaps changing its specifications.
   Still, YouTube clips are going to be fewer in number for a while, I expect.

How odd, the compose screen comes up twice over a short period, despite being out of action for two solid days. Even before those two days, it was only working intermittently (but I could deal with clicking refresh for a few hours—a few days gets boring).
   Before the service goes away again, here are some shots I wanted to share with you of Christchurch from my last visit. These were shot from my suite at the Hotel Grand Chancellor.

Apart from announcing that I would run for mayor of Wellington, the week was dominated by this:

   This computer belonged to my friend Nigel, who moved to Australia earlier this week. And as he’s very “in” to web development and graphics, he has to have the latest and greatest—which meant that this unit, even though it’s grunty and would put many modern computers to shame, sat in his shed. He generously gave it to me.
   The DVD, hard and floppy drives are mine, which at least explains the mismatched colour of the first. The floppy was originally a gift as well from another friend who was disposing a 1998-vintage PC. Interestingly, despite everything being beige in those pre-Imac days, this one happened to be black, so I took that rather than the one I had used on my old PC.
   I have now a healthy appreciation of what computer-makers do when systems are built. The unit came without the drivers, etc., and with a few faults that Nigel warned me about. When I was in Auckland two weeks ago, he plugged it in and there was no display; prior to that the main fan was faulty.
   Step by step, I (with more than a little help from Dad—who still seems to be more logical brain-wise than a lot of these younger computer types) brought this PC back to life, installed the right drivers (thank goodness for the internet) and the programs. I took the opportunity to upgrade at least one, while I had to ask for new registration numbers for two (which came overnight).
   Things went fairly smoothly other than the motherboard drivers—I put in the wrong ones and replacing them forced the computer to run so slowly that Windows XP took 40 minutes to boot! However, a System Restore fixed that and it is back to normal.
   I’m pretty proud of myself as among the tasks I had was editing a DLL for a 1995 program that would not work on newer computers. I’m certainly no computer programmer (I did take a course in BASIC and LOGO in 1984 though), but the changes (as suggested by a hacker on a forum) worked. In another case, I had a technical issue and found the solution on a forum where I had posted the answer. What was interesting was how long it takes to replace 10 years’ worth of stuff: three days.
   There remains a couple of issues. There is still one entry in the System Devices that has a yellow warning exclamation mark next to it, but the last time I tried fixing that, we had the motherboard driver issue. Secondly, while this baby is on auto-detect for the LAN speed, another computer at the office is going at a mere 10 Mbit/s when I know it is capable of going at 100 Mbit/s. Yet when I put both at the same 100 Mbit/s speed, the transfers go at about a tenth of the speed that they were going at when the settings were 10 Mbit/s and auto. It’s the exact opposite to what I expect, but it would not be the first time that network settings have had me stumped.
   Meanwhile, I have to give props to old faithful, which we used to refer to as Moneypenny (the name assigned to the hard drive):    While I’ve had a few new machines in here, I stuck with my old desktop PC. Thanks to swapping out the DVD drives, what is in here is Nigel’s. And this machine has been very good to me for over 10 years, and if you have accumulated this much stuff, then you’re a bit hesitant to take time out to redo everything on a new system. In fact, I doubt I would have proceeded with the “upgrade” if I went into a store with a couple of grand. I got a bit attached to a very faithful computer. But when you have a unit that is much newer and faster sitting in your office, despite its faults, then you have to act. You almost feel compelled to fix something that is broken.
   Of course, no one can run an international company on a computer if it stayed the same as it was in March 1999. This has been the subject of motherboard, CPU and RAM upgrades over that time, usually done by a real expert, though I did the RAM stuff myself (not that hard). It ran OK, but when I bought the Asus laptop, I found myself on that all the time. And stuff in this family just keeps going—they seem to like being here.
   The new machine does mean greater productivity, so expect to see me work more rather than blog, which was what I tended to do on the laptop because I enjoyed the better speed and, admittedly, the Windows Vista interface.
   It didn’t help that I had early starts on most days this week, after tinkering with the computer at night, attending several functions (including the Montana World of Wearable Art Awards last night) and going to bed at 3 or 4 a.m. So any typos above are mine. Hopefully I can rest up tonight. But for now, a big, public thank-you to Nigel.

I am now remembering why the last time I used Google Earth, it was 2005. It’s very hard to use.
   Say you want directions between two very common locations. I chose Buckingham Palace and Victoria Station. I fed them in.

   You click next on the search button, I presume, which is marked by the magnifying glass. I think I am right. I only started designing websites in 1993. Google doesn’t like that:    It doesn’t know which Victoria Station I meant. The logical thing is to select the first one, correct? That would signify to Google that I meant Victoria Station, London SW1V, United Kingdom.
   All it does is open yet another set of ‘Did you mean’ options: And ad infinitum.
   I have typed in, manually, Google’s version of the address into the ‘To’ box, but it still produces a ‘Did you mean’. Yes, Google, I did mean. Now, work already!
   As I have said numerous times, I wish these programs were made for the common man and not someone with a master’s or Ph.D. in computer science.

I knew the price of cigarettes was going up.

   This gentleman was charged US$23 quadrillion on his Visa for buying smokes at Mobil. (Had we stuck with the British system of counting rather than the American one, we would only need to say $23,000 billion, which makes it a little easier.) It’s one way to get people to stop smoking.
   A teenager also got dinged $23 quadrillion for dining at a restaurant, and another got stuck with a similar amount at a drugstore.

Some more oddities I have found on the web today, both relating to Google.
   Ever hear of people wanting you to give 110 per cent? Google’s Blogger service sure tries hard:

In a republish yesterday, Blogger reported that it was giving 103 per cent.
   Here’s one from just a few moments ago. Selling Cialis? Google News now picks that up: See the second and fourth entries. I found a third one there as well.
   And remember the PHP error I noted at the end of June? It turns out I am not alone with Firefox refusing to open a page and prompting me to save it instead, as I finally found this complaint today. However, unlike the complainant I was unable to solve it and the error is not on the servers I visited. As he was using Ubuntu, and I am using Windows, we can probably conclude that the error is Firefox’s alone, and sporadic as well.

Here are some of the everyday things that happen to me when using Wordpress, yet I can find no mention of these errors. Any other blogger experiencing these? I have experienced this regularly in XP and Vista, but only recently. It’s either a Wordpress bug, a PHP bug on our server, or a Firefox bug. (Of the three, Firefox has changed; the others have not, to my knowledge.)
   1. The weird link glitch. No matter what I click on, Wordpress refuses to go to that particular page. So if I clicked ‘Manage’, Wordpress clicks through to every page but the one I requested. It might go to the dashboard, the comments, or, most regularly yesterday, the create-post page.
   2. The page appearing inside random boxes glitch. For no apparent reason, entire pages load into boxes where they aren’t supposed to go. This may happen to any box on any page in Wordpress. Here is me accessing one of our blog posts at Lucire at random to demonstrate:

My knowledge of computers is roughly around the level of Fred Flintstone, so can someone tell me: if I see no RAM in the memory slots, does this mean the computer has no RAM? Or is RAM built in somewhere else?

   Somehow I will figure out how this Microsoft Word works.

I was trying to access the BMW page at Autocade, something I have done without any problem a few hours before. And the following error, which has come up before when visiting other sites (notably the Unofficial Austin Rover Resource) came up:

   The other pages work, just not the BMW one. I ask it to open in Firefox and I get this window:    Any clues on what this error is? The same page worked fine a while back, and I expect it will work fine in a few hours’ time. This is one of Firefox’s strange errors. A brief Google search on the error message either reveals nothing relevant, or it is all in gobbledegook. (One says the stylesheet is wrong, which begs the most logical question: how come the other pages all work?)