Archive for category technology
Hardware vs Software
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, thoughts, troubleshooting on February 11th, 2010
I decided to call them that! Hardware and Software people/approach. Two people can attempt solving a problem in different ways.
Imagine this scenario, PC, cable and another system/gadget. The cables is used to drive data from PC to system. If the PC suddenly says cable problem when you are trying to push the data to the connected device, how do you solve the problem?
Hardware people start off by touching the cable! Making sure that the cable is properly connected at both ends and maybe replace it with another cable just to make sure that the cable is not the cause and go on from there to solve the problem.
Software people start with restarting the application and maybe re-install/update the driver. They may even examine the cable settings from the PC, the bit rate, connection type, device type, etc. and go on from there to solve the problem.
Both might end up solving the problem, it could’ve been a loosely connected cable or improper settings, two different mind sets with the same aim.
Google Translate
Posted by Bloggylife in technology on January 27th, 2010
I just love it 
I tried automatically detect the language but it could not, so I forced the language option.
Google Solution Wanted
Posted by Bloggylife in technology on January 10th, 2010
Sometimes I search for solution based on needs I am having. I am Googlized 
aren’t we all. I have my gmails, my google search results bookmarked, my google documents, google waves, even tweets. Sometimes I want to centralize them all together, is there a product out there that does that for me. Why am I having something called, Google Projects in mind, is it out there or am I imagining it.
I want to be able to create a project within a portal for example, and link everything I have control over in one location. I’d set a project page and name it, link all related emails, documents, tweets, bookmarked search results, youtube videos, etc. Has anyone got the solution or an idea? I just don’t want to alt+tab or ctrl+tab no. all the time.
btw, is twitter still a standalone, has anyone bought it, Google, Microsoft, since everything is bought by either Google or Microsoft nowadays, I remember the last one was Google with youtube and Yahoo with who again ??
Publish Bug Update (link):
Firefox browser has no problem, just Chrome. Preview then Publish clicked from the same window can be done with Firefox but not Chrome!
Network Issue: I Know Why!
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting on January 5th, 2010
So I know why the IP phone in my room is not working on this port. That particular port is not configured as part of the voice network. Should I call up the IT department and give them the socket label and tell them to include the switch port to the voice network. I can simply suggest to switch cable connections on the switch side or just give me the keys to the building’s data room and I’ll do it 
It’ll be a bonus, I’ll see the data room, switches, configurations, cable management, cable types, cabinet layout, physical security, all in all, it’s a win win situation
It so much simpler when you are in charge
Google Translate
Posted by Bloggylife in technology on November 27th, 2009
I did write about this before, but I love Google and what they have to offer.
How their services take over our daily vocabulary.
Does a day go by without one saying, “Did you google it?”
Now I’m using a new one, “I’ll wave it to you” when I’m using googlewave 
I notice now, for Google Translate, you can write an Arabic word using English letter and press the spacebar and it’ll automatically convert to Arabic, without the hassle of (alt+shift) between Arabic-English keyboard settings
If you translate to English, a small speaker icon appears and you can hear the word out and it’s only for the English words so far. I tried French, but the feature is not included.
When typing in the box, the translate is done live on the wire! Isn’t that cool, so you can see the formed words interpreted at each keystroke, it’s kind of fun
The one thing I’m missing is having a spelling checker, I’m not sure why my browser doesn’t do that! I do remember that it’s included within my Chrome or was that Firefox, will check it out laters.
Go Google, keep ‘em good things coming
Google Wave
Posted by Bloggylife in technology on November 19th, 2009
I’m still trying to figure out Google wave and haven’t read too much about it and mainly used it so far in a manner of normal chat and emails.
I’m just going to point out the things I ponder from my scratching the surface of Google Wave.
- I still don’t get the live wire update, as soon as I lock down a character in one end the other end sees it, is it feasible performance wise and also in the real world I don’t think it is practical practice, one always read proofs before submitting.
- In an email, you have the “To”, “Cc” and “Bcc” field, currently in Google wave there is only one field which is basically the “To” in an email. I’m sure that’ll be put in somehow.
- I think wave clients will come out just like email/twitter/chat clients. Someone somewhere will give it a try. Though it’s a bit tricky, because do you want to be notified of all new waves and/or updates of waves. I think that can be managed through settings somehow.
- In the navigation box, there’s Inbox, All, By Me, what’s the difference? Also, if you hover over them there are options, move up/down, which basically moves the option up and down and then there is set colour, which just sets the background of that option to your selected colour. I thought it would tag the waves within that particular category with the selected colour but it didn’t! Strange option, didn’t see the use of it.
- Could someone please tell me, how to delete a wave indefinitely! It just sits there in the trash.
I still need to figure out and be comfortable with waving Also, having your own wave server!
MAC-ness
Posted by Bloggylife in UK, technology, thoughts on October 16th, 2009
The computer services director was talking about the importance of installing an anti-virus software of personal laptops and the university can not provide one to their students for licensing issues but recommended some free ones, like AVG, which I have installed on my laptop.
One question was asked, “what is recommended for a mac?”
The director wasn’t aware of free mac software, but then this debate started that for a mac you don’t need an anti-virus!
“mac doesn’t need one”
“I’ve had mine for over 6 years, no anti-virus software installed and no problems at all”
OK this is madness anti-virus applications are now more than scanning and protecting the computers from viruses, these are the modules in my current AVG software.
I’ve disabled the resident shield because it’s scans, real-time, files you are working with, it’s annoying and if you are viewing a video, the experience is terrible.
Some argue that mac infections are low because not that many use them compared to windows and also because the majority use windows thus more hate it From an attacker point of view, target the largest market share.
Sleepless Roaming Thoughts
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, thoughts on October 7th, 2009
I couldn’t sleep last night, mainly because my dad and I are sleeping in the same room and he snores!
Anyway, this question popped in my head so me, myself and I can debate it, do people really need to carry their laptops with them nowadays?
It’s not about needing to check your emails anymore, it’s about taking your office with you, having all your data and applications at the touch of your fingertips.
So the computing device becomes a dummy terminal with good processing power that provides an access to your much needed information wherever it may reside.
In companies network, we provide that by establishing secure connection to our network that contains our data, we install VPN clients on end users’ machines, sometimes you run into incompatibility issues with certain operating systems, aka Vista oo 64-bit ba3ad, so you provide secure connection via SSL, of course performance wise, having a running encrypting application is better. You can give it a try and compare.
Accessing files back in the office that you can’t carry on, running published licensed applications, accessing internal resources, etc.
Imagine, in the future we’d have all our data roaming somewhere in a big bubble over the Internet stamped with our names and we’d have terminals, we won’t need to worry about it having the proper application to run a certain file, because the application is published somewhere. That puts a lot of worries aside.
Processing power isn’t an issue, nor storage, it’s enough bandwidth.
That was something I debated in my mind until I fell asleep, I may have overlooked a lot of issues, but weird things pop in my head if I didn’t sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow
Increase Virtual Hard Disk
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting on June 15th, 2009
We’ve started with virtualization, I’ll talk about this beautiful sexy technology some other time. My hands are all over it.
When creating virtual machines, each seems to have it’s own hard disk and partitions, but in fact they all share a single storage to which the virtual server that manages the virtual machines points to.
I got one v-machine with 20 GB of hard disk space and I want to increase it. Through the setting of the machines you can increase the hard disk space. Back to the v-machine, go to computer management -> disk management, you’ll see the newly unallocated space, to partition and format.
I couldn’t extend my single primary partition with the tools available in windows, I think I’ll need third party softwares.
What I did, is clone my v-machine and as I was creating the new settings, increased the C volume space. of course, you’ll need enough space to be able to create this replica machine.
Don’t forget to, tick off the connected box in network settings, if you added a network, because you don’t want conflict issues, when powering on the new machine.
Will test it fully tomorrow, to make sure all is good. Give the same settings, IP, computer name, etc, to the newly created v-machine and shut down the original one. If all goes well after some time, delete the original one to free up some space.
Image Spam
Posted by Bloggylife in technology on May 5th, 2009
Of all the emails we receive within 24 hours, around 95 % is spam! Of course we deploy a mail filter to go through all these emails and pass the legitimate ones only.
Now we are introduced to some emails that are clearly spam but get through, you’ll see the email with an image attachment of Viagra products for example.
If your filter box is text based, it won’t detect this kind of spam, the image spam. A brief overall description, of how a message is considered valid or spam, is it goes through several tests, based on the overall score, the verdict is issued.
The email can be blocked based on a number of things other than the email content, you can block all emails with images except coming from your whitelist for example, but this is not acceptable, especially if you have what I like to call the “Friends Spam”, employees using their work account as personal mailing account.
Your filter needs to include a special image filtering feature, that goes, even if not quite efficiently, through the image and detects text. I don’t think it understands the image itself, because we are still advancing in that arena.
What you can do, is add the sender’s address or domain to your blocked list.
On a lighter note, if there is a small little tiny chance that a spam message passes through, your main mail filter appliance and the end user’s email scanner, which employee’s inbox will it end up in ?????
Read More on Email Spam: Link
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the technology category.
Recent Comments