HTC Desire

HTC just announced via facebook that they will not be updating the HTC Desire any longer. Apparently it doesn't have enough storage space for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) + HTC Sense 3.0. There are a few angry ways that users could react to this.

First of all, there is the argument that HTC are only refusing to upgrade the Desire because they want users to upgrade to new handsets. Extending the lifetime of their old phones doesn't make them any money. This is at the cost of customer satisfaction though, and it's sad because most users will have 2 year contracts, and like me, had hoped that updates would at least carry on for the length of your contract since this was one of HTC's flagship phones. I've owned my phone for a whole year already, but I would be pretty pissed off if I had bought it recently to then discover HTC had abandoned it. What version of Android will be out one year from now, and what will the resale value of your Desire be if the Android version is 18 months out of date?

Secondly, the Nexus One, which is basically a Desire in a different shell with a trackball, is quite capable of running Android 2.3. Google pushed it out a few months ago.  So it seems to be clear that the problem is HTC Sense, it has become too bloated and no longer fits on the small storage of the Desire. In an ideal world they should give us the upgrade option of Android 2.3 without Sense.

Thirdly, there are TONS of Android 2.3 roms that include HTC Sense on XDA. The fact that these exist and work perfectly well as a daily rom helps to argue the point that HTC's reasons for abandoning the Desire are a load of crap. Whether you root or not, you can see that this phone is capable of running Gingerbread.

Finally, there are the rooters. They don't care; they have been running Android 2.3 on the Desire for 6 months already. But it's been a tough journey - HTC went out of their way to lock the bootloader and the nand (storage), to make flashing custom roms difficult. Without groups like AlphaRev we would not have freedom to install whatever we like on our Desires and we would be chained to Froyo for the lifetime of our phones. It's sad because shouldn't have to be this way. Normal users will not hack their phones to run CyanogenMod. They will be stuck on Froyo for the remaining lifetime of their phones. They won't get any of the new features of Android, bug fixes, or security updates, and to me that just seems wrong.

Update: Apparently HTC will bring Gingerbread to the Desire after all. We'll see.

• - Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - August 2009 (KB890830)
• - Update for Windows Mail Junk E-mail Filter [August 2009] (KB905866)
• - Security Update for Windows Vista (KB973540)
• - Update for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Junk Email Filter (KB972691)
• - Security Update for Windows Vista (KB971557)
• - Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 (KB972594)
• - Security Update for Windows Vista (KB956744)
• - Security Update for Windows Vista (KB971657)
• - Security Update for Windows Vista (KB973507)

One of these updates broke my network connectivity. The NIC was still available but DHCP was broken, and assigning a static address would not help. The device itself was functioning normally and nothing in the event log gave any clues. Looking in the update history in the Windows Update application, all of these security updates have the same description:

A security issue has been identified that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to compromise your system and gain control over it.

Microsoft, how about telling me what the hell is being patched, since I can't use the links to the technet articles as my network stack was broken. Not very helpful when I am trying to figure out which patch has wrecked the system.

Cold light of day edit: I realise this is a Microsoft problem, not neccessilary a Vista problem.

Luckily System Restore actually works, and returned me to where I started at 5:00 this afternoon, with everything working.

One final thing. Why is Vista such a resource pig? This computer is a dual core AMD64 2.30Ghz but it runs like its been eating pastry all day. As I am typing this, I have 4 apps open, my CPU is boiling over and my memory usage is over 1Gb. Why?! This PC is only used for web surfing, email and music.

Vista ... why oh why

OK - so ending the apps in my tray (Skype, Gladinet, MSN and Avast) have recovered a few hundred Mb, but I don't see why Vista is so bad at memory management compared to Windows XP, Windows 7 ... or for that matter any Linux distro ...

Well thats it, I can't be arsed troubleshooting it. I'm through with Vista. Time to backup, wipe and move on.

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/web778/web/wp-includes/widgets.php:1307) in /var/www/web778/web/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 689

I surfed onto the K2 website and found a blog post 4 days old explaining this was fixed in the latest SVN release. Quick fix was to grab the SVN using:

svn checkout http://kaytwo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ kaytwo-read-only

Then trash the K2 directory on my WordPress site and replace the files with the latest and greatest. It worked a treat for me. Actually my sidebar has stopped working now and all of my posts are 'uncatagorised' ... looks like I'll be going back to a default theme for now. I wonder if I can get my catagories back from a backup ...

Answer: MailSweeper delivery service will die and mail will start to queue on your server. Messages will build up in the 'domains' folders and in 'holding' as your the policy server becomes unable to deliver any more mail.

This happened to me today. It was noticed early as I use an spool watching utility (free on JMC's mswtools.org) which uses blat to send alerts when the number of files in the MSW spool directories go over certain thresholds.

According to the ClearSwift engineer I spoke to, the problem is to do with the way the delivery service can only handle 50 threads at a time. One would imagine a policy server would cope with 2000 messages being dumped on it but apparently this will just keel it over. Multiple reboots did seem to give enough short bursts to clear the 'domains' queues apart from one internal domain containing around 800 delivery receipts and 100 business e-mails. The problem was, on most of these delivery receipts and delivery failures the original message was attached, and the queue was standing at around 900Mb. This would not clear and forcing a retry seemed to make the processing just freeze up. Unfortunately MailSweeper lacks controls on this part of the homepage to delete items in the delivery queue, so to purge all of the delivery receipts I had to delete the corresponding files in the file system on the PS. The problem to overcome then is, how do you make sure you only delete the delivery receipts when the folder is full of randomly named RCP files? I used the following commands within that domain folder to achieve this:

findstr /S /M "Message relayed" *.RCP > output.txt
FOR /F %I IN (output.txt) DO del %I

Tomorrow I'll be implementing a much lower limit on the number of recipients per message that can be sent through Exchange, and of course suggesting a better method of delivering this PDF in the future. I'm thinking Morse code ...

Edit: Just found the default in Exchange 2003 is a maximum of 64000 recipients per message!

Technorati Tags: MailSweeper, MIMESweeper

Last week I was browsing the Internet on my DELL laptop at home, and for no apparent reason I found that I kept getting redirected from the Sky Broadband website to an utterly useless DELL Search page littered with ads. A bit of research into this annoying problem revealed this is not a new issue for DELL users. It's caused by DELL crapware that comes pre-installed on laptops, and people have been complaining about in the DELL user forums and in blogs for over a year already.

I found a few ways to remove it including using HijackThis (which does actually identify this DELL software as spyware) but the easy way is as follows:

- In Internet Explorer go to Tools - Options
- On the Programs tab click on Manage Add-On's
- Select CBrowserHelperObject (published by Dell Inc)
- In 'settings' at the bottom select Disable, and click OK.

Rant
What on earth were DELL thinking?! Can't see this is just going to piss people off and turn people away from DELL in the future? It does make me wonder if they'll do the same thing with the PC's they're now loading with Ubuntu ... maybe we'll see the DELL decrapifier for Linux soon?

What makes me the most angry is this is DELL search page is even worse than newdotnet in some ways ... at least with newdotnet you only get redirected when you visit a bad address. The DELL search page actually appears when you try to go to valid links!

Here's a DIY tip for anyone about to strip a room of woodchip wallpaper. Don't waste your time with normal wallpaper scrapers as you will be there scraping away for days, especially if there is more than one layer of paint on the walls. What makes this job so tough is the water or steam does not penetrate through those layers of paint, and if you get the walls too wet there is a danger you will ruin the plaster underneath.

The best woodchip removal method is to get yourself a heavy duty scraper with a razor sharp blade (a bit like this one), and scrape the top layer off the walls while they are dry. You should then find layer underneath then comes off very easily if you use a steamer or a wet sponge. The remains will just turn into pulp as you scrape it off. Scraping the top layer is still hard work but I'm talking from experience when I say it will take a lot less effort and man hours than using a normal scraper. If your room is very large you will also some spare blades for your scraper as they are easily blunted when you hit wall plugs, loose plaster or other objects in the wall.

Technorati Tags: Decorating

I think what we need is some more radical action from our government, starting with legislation that forces businesses and individuals to use renewable energy. Building regulations that force new houses to use energy efficient boilers is a step in the right direction but does not go far enough. New builds should all use solar energy for hot water, and under floor heating which requires much lower temperatures to create the same ambient room temperatures. Although it has not been widely adopted, the use of solar energy for heating has already been proven in this country, even though we do not get a massive amount of sun compared to Southern Europe.

I do realise that the initial setup cost of solar heating is higher, but this cannot be used as an excuse as we need to start tackling this problem on a long term basis. The savings on a monthly basis for those living in these houses will be realised immediately, and the reduction in our consumption of the worlds combustible fuels would be noticeable in years to come.

My wife and I are due to move house soon into an older property, which according to the survey may need a plumbing overhaul in the near future. We have already started looking at the costs of using solar energy for our heating needs, and it looks like £4000 is a typical ballpark figure for the installation cost on a 3 bedroom house. The government will currently refund £400 of this cost to you after the work is done, providing your house also has certain other energy saving attributes (like double glazing, cavity wall insulation, etc). This does seem a bit expensive - we would have to live there for 8 years afterwards to regain the cost and start saving money, but if we do go down this route I will definitely feel proud to be doing our small bit towards saving the planet.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Solar Energy, Renewable Energy, Global Warming

Here's the annoying thing - on my monitor (and countless others - read these comments) ClearType fonts look absolutely awful. It makes me squint and actually hurts my eyes after 10 minutes of exposure to it. And, the IE installer does not ask you if you want ClearType enabled, it just installs it and you have to lump it. It's basically a system-wide change to your fonts and display options, without any notificication to the user, and with no means to configure it or switch it off in Control Panel.

But before you uninstall IE7 in a flash, you might like to know there is actually a control panel applet for tuning Cleartype, but it's a seperate download from Microsoft called the ClearType Tuner Powertoy. It allows you to optimise ClearType for your monitor, or if it really doesn't look good at all, you can just select a box to turn ClearType off.

Microsoft, if you're reading this, please make this powertoy part of the IE7 installer and run it as a wizard the first time IE7 is launched? It will save users a lot of headaches - literally.

Technorati Tags: IE7, Internet Explorer, ClearType

This weekend, a botnet started attacking afraid.org and bought it and all 4 of it's name servers to their knees, bring mine and hundreds of other websites down. The attack is still going on now. I guess I can't moan too much because my blog and server at home are just for fun, but I feel sorry for the other paying, premium customers who will also have been affected by this, and who's websites downtimes can be directly translated to lost sales and revenue.

I managed to get on to the afraid.org forum for long enough to view the thread describing the attack. Josh Anderson who owns and maintains the services, posted this in the thread:

"I don't want to get too specific on the forums publicly with the fine attack details, but the attack was difficult to filter against at least by the night crew, and was about 300 mbps so the ISP would not allow it in for me to ipfw it off, because it would impact other customers, more then the network its self can handle, and they were not able to build a filter against it to scrub it out for some reason, normally they're reasonably good about it, but this has been going on for like 8 days off and on. Could be the time that it happened, since it was like in the early AM on a Sunday, maybe during business hours things would be different with a different crew, I honestly don't know.

As for retalliation, no one is worth the time it would take to bother attacking back, and other innocent networks that would probably be harmed in the process. I'm simply more exposed to attack vs them, since I actually have a human driven communitiy here. I have to accept it and try to build around it. I need to focus on the beneficial-to-me things I can do to help avoid total downtime vs detremental-to-them things I could do that just wouldn't be worth the effort.

I appreciate the kind words and helpful suggestions guys

Josh"

There's not much I can do apart from wait for the attack to finish and watch for updates on the forum. I want to keep using afraid.org, and it doesn't seem fair to move my custom elsewhere as it's not their fault that this is happening.

No doubt the source of all this is a teenage grunt on a power trip controlling an army of compromised XP computers. I suspect that if the penalties for computer crime were more severe and this sort of stuff was actually policed, he would probably be outside the reach of the law anyway due to his young age. But, somehow I can't see stuff like this EVER being policed, so something else needs to change; Windows needs to become more secure. But it's not only Microsoft's fault, the public at large need to keep their computers updated and understand what happens when they don't. We need to make things less easy for the hackers.

I dread to think how many XP computers there are connected on fast broadband connections, that are always switched on and don't have any anti-virus installed. If all of those computers were suddenly patched, had anti-virus installed and then got rebooted tonight, what would become of the hackers and their software zombies then? Would the Internet stay clean and safe for long? I doubt it. But maybe if one third of the world used Apple Mac's, one third used Linux, and the remainder used Windows, that would begin to make things tougher for them. (yeah, keep on dreaming... )

Technorati Tags: Rant, Opinion, Hackers, BotNet, FreeDNS, afraid.org

• Installs without your knowledge or consent
• Does not appear in add/remove programs
• 'Phones home' with information, normally about Internet browsing activities

NewDotNet claims that their software is not spyware, and yet it meets all of my criteria above. I discovered it on my laptop yesterday, it's one of those annoying 'search' programs that replaces the 'Page cannot be displayed' page when you type in a bad URL (like ww.google.com). I wonder if anyone actually uses these search programs?

The thing that really annoyed me was the removal process for this software. It doesn't appear in Add/Remove programs. You cannot simply delete the folder containing the DLL from your C: drive as you get an 'Access Denied' message. OK, so how about deleting all references to newdotnet and new.net from the registry, rebooting and then deleting the files? Not a bad approach, and I've used it to clean spyware from my machine before. But, you can't do it with newdotnet because it will break your winsock stack, and therefore all of your network devices will stop functioning. The next time you reboot you will get an error message and be unable to access the Internet.

But why would a program want to re-engineer your winsock stack though? The answer is because doing so can allow all DNS queries to be forced through the newdotnet DLL, so that when you request a bad or malformed URL such as http://ben.stokes in your browser, newdotnet will perform the DNS query instead of your usual DNS server, and if the domain does not exist, it will redirect your browser to 'quickbrowsersearch'.

So you can see it's truly awful software, one might even so far as to call it "a pile of wank". There are stories in forum posts about people who have reinstalled Windows just to get rid of it. Below are some links including more information on what newdotnet does and how to clean it off your system:

• PCPitStop Forums Thread on newdotnet
• WinTipz.com
• cexx.org explains newdotnet in some depth

Since newdotnet have been known to file lawsuits to people who accuse them of writing spyware, I will point out now that the article above is based on my personal thoughts, opinions and experiences, rather than facts.

Technorati Tags: NewDotNet, new.net, Spyware, Internet Explorer, Security, Rant, Opinion