You Can't Coach That

Sunday, June 24, 2007

I went to an Adobe Roadshow presentation on Thursday of last week where they were showing off the newest and shiniest bit of the updated suite. There is one particular Photoshop feature that I can’t wait to try. Image Auto-Align looks really useful. Have you ever taken a group photo only for someone to be looking away from the camera or closing their eyes? You quickly take another one before anyone moves, only to have someone else do something to ruin the shot.

This is where Auto-Align comes in. Photoshop will automatically align the pixels in the two photos allowing for a mask to be used to “paint out” any features that are not perfect. The person looking away from the camera in one shot is removed and replaced with the pixels where they are looking at the camera.

When my copy of the CS3 suite arrives I will do a demo of how its done.

“You can’t coach that”

Friday, June 22, 2007

Ah, that feels better. I can sense the fear coming from Microsoft HQ now.

I’m in the final stages of planning for my move to the Mac. The finance minister has given her blessing. All that remains is to find a gullible bank manager.

I have been reading about the latest version of parallels, which will be on my list of software to acquire, and learned about a piece of pure genius from Bill’s Boffins. It seems that the EULA for Windows Vista  does not allow for the Home Basic or Home Premium versions to be run under virtualization. For the provilege of using "the best version of Windows ever" I would have to buy one of the more expensive versions.

I don’t actually intend purchasing any version of Vista at the moment. I own several copies of XP Pro and this will be just fine for running the occasional Windows application. I just believe there would be a restriction like this. Some time down the track I may in fact want to install Vista. I can envisage members of my family running Vista Home and needing support. I will find it difficult to give support without having my own copy installed. Apparantly when that time comes I will have to pay the extra money for a business focused edition.

According to iTWire, the reason for the restriction is security based. To quote from iTWire:

Microsoft’s original justification for the restriction is security. It’s not that Vista Home is inherently less secure than the other versions, just that the company feels that those who opt for Home aren’t sophisticated enough to manage security in a virtualised environment.

Two things come to mind - 1. don’t insult me! 2. I thought Vista was the most secure operating system known to man.

"You can’t coach that" 

Friday, June 15, 2007

I don’t know whether I am late to the party on this, but I have just discovered (via The Lab with Leo on the How To Channel) a number of online file conversion options. Zamzar in particular is going to be very useful for me in the future as Office 2007 becomes more widely used and I therefore need to convert word documents back to the old .doc format. It also does audio and video and emails the file to you when it is done. It’s free and like everything else it seems these days is in Beta.

“You can’t coach that”

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Keep an eye on the newspapers folks you should be seeing a headline like:

Dell Laptop Seen Re-entering Atmosphere Over Brisbane

Did I mention I hate Windows? I seem to have fixed the issue (said with fingers crossed, rabbit’s foot in hand, knocking on wood, stroking my four leaf clover while caressing the penny picked up in the street today). It appears that the video card driver was corrupt and after four reinstalls of said video card driver things are a little more sane here. Yes you read that right, it took four attempts to get the video card driver to install correctly.

This was an incredibly frustrating problem to diagnose and fix. The problem only occurred using Firefox and only on certain web pages when scrolling. It just so happened that it was happening on two blogs that I like to read regularly.

For anyone interested here are some useful things I have learned from the experience:

1. Windows errors are logged in the Event Viewer, available through “administrative tools”. I was aware of this but had not used much to this point.
2. Once you have an “event id” and “source” you can go to eventid.net for information on what problem generated that code. This is what tipped me off to the video card driver
3. There is a separate issue with Windows Live Update that causes a period of 100% CPU usage on start up and connection to the internet. I am still looking for a solution for this one
4. Laptop computers do not respond to profanity or physical abuse
5. In times of high stress, the adage “panic slowly” is a good thing to keep in mind

As for the 100% cpu usage issue, I have no idea why it would be happening now and not before my recent clean install. I suspect a Windows update has broken something. It looks like I will have to turn off automatic updates until I can find a solution to this one. Process Explorer from sysinternals.com (now part of Microsoft it would appear) is an excellent free utility to see which services are running and the processes under those services.

The new system is still on the wish list. Might have to go back to still life modeling to pay for it

“You can’t coach that”

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

I am still running the free Comodo Firewall on two machines without any problems. It does seem a little slow to “learn”. I seem to be getting repeat requests for some programs to access the internet.

After the negative comments I mentioned in an earlier post I decided to stop using the antivirus program. After all it is still in beta. The uninstall went without a hitch despite some comments I had read about it being a nightmare to get rid of. Perhaps these comments were for beta 1 - I had beta 2.0.

I am now using AVG free antivirus - not sure how effective it is but the price is right. Any thoughts anyone?

Saturday, May 05, 2007

I recently posted about Comodo’s free security products. I have been using their firewall and antivirus for a few days now and so far my impression is positive.

The Firewall is very active at the moment which is what I would expect soon after an install. It is constantly asking for permission to allow certain processes and applications to access the internet or act as a server. I am happy with this as I would prefer to monitor activity and manually allow rather than use a more automatic approach. So far each one has been expected and I have allowed the access. The firewall passed the Steve Gibson shields up test with flying colours.

So far though it is the antivirus program that has impressed me. While I haven’t fully investigated its success rate in detection and removal, I have noticed how light it is on system resources. This is the first antivirus program I have used whereby I have been able to use the pc normally while a full system scan is being performed. I noticed virtually no slow down or lag at all. Sitting idle in the system tray with all the on demand scanning and background checking turned on it is consuming about 3.5MB of physical memory.

Now a warning - Is there such a thing as a free lunch?

I have since found some interesting comments posted about the Comodo products and the installation of what some are calling adware. See this article at trimMail’s Email Battles. There are plenty of positive things said about the products in the comments to this article as well as some negative. This seems quite the norm when people discuss this sort of software.

As for the Launchpad program which seems to be the cause for the adware claims - it doesn’t install with the firewall or the antivirus as far as I can tell. On another machine where I have installed the free backup program and the iVault password manager launchpad has been installed. I wasn’t asked as part of the installation whether I wanted it. Is it adware? I suppose so. When the program is opened it shows you the applications you have installed and lists the others that are available from the Comodo website. That’s about it as far as I can tell. It also provides a simple way to launch all the Comodo products from one place (it is called launchpad after all). It sits in the system tray but can be closed if desired. I don’t know whether it can be uninstalled but at the moment I don’t really care.

The AV program is in Beta. There are a number of comments in the above mentioned article about the AV program having their system for lunch. Again, my experience has been positive so far. i haven’t tried to uninstall it though so I can’t comment on how easy or difficult to remove it is.

Finally, by way of balance here are two opposing comments posted about the products. Make up your own mind but perhaps caution is best.

The Bad:

I’ve beta tested software for years, documenting and reporting bugs as they appear. Comodo AV should have never been released. It is a TOTAL POS that is impossible to uninstall. I expect issues with beta software, but not with such a basic element and uninstalling it. Not only will the installer launch with every browser instance, but it becomes corrupted to the point that you will not be able to install anything that uses the Microsoft Windows Installer engine and will most likely not be able to uninstall many programs as well.

If you search the web you’ll find that this problem is rampant and Comodo’s method of dealing with it had been to just simply pretend it doesn’t exist. If they are really pressed on the issue, they respond with “well..it is beta”. What will their respose be if a serious issue was brought to light with one of their “released” products?? “Well it is freeware”??

Their support sucks, they have no solution, and have not attempted to come up with a patch or fix to rectify this unbeleivable programming error.
Month after month goes by, and my emails continue to go unanswered.

The way in which they have handled this says a lot about the company.
My advice is, spare your seld the grief and coutless hours of frustration and steer a wide path from anything remotely related to Comodo.

The Good:

COMODO Firewall, kicks ZoneLabs Zone Alarm right out the door!

COMODO AntiVirus is beta, and is being worked on and improved
all the time .
McAfee, Norton, and other big name apps. are a constant commerical ….. and their so-called Security Centers …….?
Are crap adds (at best) I have been running COMODO AV on one PC for a while, and it has found lot’s of stuff that The so-called big AV software has flat-assed missed !

I have been using NOD 32 on my online Gaming PC ( AcesHigh, air combat game ) and have had great results with it. COMODO AntiVirus is going to replace NOD 32, when the sub expires in two weeks …..

ps COMODO’s anti spam sofdtware works !

Monday, April 30, 2007

While reading Hamarana, another great Aussie blog, I found a link to Comodo’s free products. One particular program that looks interesting and that I will be trying out over the next few days is iVault. Here’s what they have to say about it:

iVault saves time by providing instantaneous logins to any username/password secured web pages such as online banking and email account sites. It also doubles up as a 256 bit secure storage for private and confidential information such as credit card details and social security numbers and protects against the very latest key-logging Trojan Horse viruses.

This looks very much to me like Roboform which would have to be the most useful piece of software I have ever bought (actually my Dad paid for it - thanks Dad). I currently have 142 user name and password combinations saved by roboform and they all allow me to log into 142 different web pages with only one click. I would be absolutely lost without it.

Up until now I haven’t always recommended Roboform to others because of the cost but now there may be an alternative. I will post again when I have tested it.

“You can’t coach that”