Getting started with ADSL

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I helped my neighbour to get a PC and a Mac working with AOL and an ADSL connection. It wasn’t straightforward, hence the reasons for writing about it on this blog, and I’ve had more than one request for help on the subject since.

My Macintosh knowledge is patchy, at best, and I certainly don’t have time to provide PC support for everyone (the rules for comments on this blog point out that I’ll help if I can but I have a day job too); however one lady was particularly stuck as she was trying to negotiate the technical minefield of understanding here options for moving from a dial-up AOL connection to broadband. Yes, it might be straightforward to a techie, but I’ve been playing with PCs for 18 years, have a Computer Studies degree and this is my 12th year as an IT professional, yet I still needed advice from my friends on how it all works when my wife campaigned to get BT to upgrade our local telephone exchange and remove the final hurdle to our broadband access (we were one of the first ADSL-connected households after the Olney exchange was finally upgraded in the Spring of 2003).

With all this in mind, I thought I’d post some information for anyone who is trying to “get broadband”. At the time of writing, in the UK, a broadband Internet connection generally means cable (e.g. NTL/Telewest), or ADSL (from a telecommunications company like BT, usually resold through an Internet service provider – I use PlusNet and I know people who are extremely happy with both Nildram and clara.net). I don’t know much about cable broadband, but for ADSL users there is an excellent ADSL guide, including a beginners guide/how it works, availability/demand tracking information and a speed test.

Blogger hacks

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Blogger logoIn common with many other bloggers, I use Google‘s Blogger service to generate the code for this blog. There are alternatives (like WordPress) but Blogger has been working well for me up to now (especially compared with the mixed experiences I had with Scott Watermasysk‘s .Text and Community Server engines whilst I was blogging at Conchango). There are some things I wish Blogger could offer – like a post calendar, post categories, the ability to control the number of recent posts shown on the sidebar (I can only set the number of posts on the front page) and a choice between RSS and Atom syndication – but on the whole it’s pretty good.

What’s especially good is that the guys who look after Blogger admit its shortcomings and even post Blogger hacks in the help system, publicising tweaks to make the system better meet users’ needs.

I’ve implemented a couple of these on the site recently, so I wanted to give the script authors some credit for helping me make this blog a better place (I hope).

  1. Firstly, there’s the archive list reversal (i.e. most recent first) and drop-down combo. For this I have to thank Roveberg, whose script worked a treat for me when I added it to my template today.
  2. Secondly, there is the on this day script from New Links, which I’ve added to provide links to the BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia pages for any given day in history (you can see these below the date for each new entry).

I’ve also implemented a few hacks from Blogger’s own help system, like the e-mail this post link at the bottom of each post (next to the comment count).

Combined with an assortment of applets in the sidebar, I hope these help to improve the user experience. If there’s anything missing that would really help you to use this blog more effectively, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

In something of a pre-emptive response to a comment that I might realistically expect to receive, I know that web site advertisements are a pain, but they are also a sad fact of life for many of us who are trying to cover our hosting costs on a site which is essentially a spare-time hobby (hence the reason for the wide variations in post frequency and quality around here). I finally sold out last summer and since then I’ve tried to keep the ads as unobtrusive as possible (whilst hopefully remaining effective). I hope never to have to resort to pop-ups or similar mechanisms and your support is gratefully received.

[Update: This site moved to WordPress in March 2007]

Want to improve your Google search results?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Have you ever wanted to improved your Google search results? I don’t mean getting a page to appear higher on Google’s rankings, but have you ever wondered why Google returns several million results from a search? To narrow things down a bit, try some of the tips from the Thoughtful Solutions Google searching quick reference card.

Windows on a Mac?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Ever since Apple announced last year that they will switch to using Intel processors, the industry has been alive with speculation as to which Mac model will switch first. My view is a bit different – Apple make fantastic-looking PCs, and if they have Intel hardware I ought to be able to run a version of Windows on one. Or, perhaps I could run Mac OS X in a Virtual PC on Windows (probably not, as I guess it will look for an Apple trusted platform module)?

On the way to work today, I was listening to episode 36 of the This Week in Tech podcast (incidentally, one of my favourite podcasts – even if it is a little US-centric) which briefly discusses the possibility of a new emulator for Windows applications on a Mac (not like Wine for Linux, which is API-based – you will need a copy of Windows in order to make this work, in a similar manner to running Linux applications on Solaris using BrandZ), so maybe I really can have the best of both worlds.

All I need to know now is, with the industry finally starting the push to 64-bit technology, will the new Intel Macs use cheap 32-bit processors (an early report from ThinkSecret suggested 3.6GHz Pentium 4s), or some new 64-bit dual-core beast? With CES taking place this week (Intel has already made some major announcements about its brand, identity and technology direction) and MacWorld next week (surely there must be some news there about Intel Macs), maybe we’ll get an answer soon.

Beefing up IIS – Apache style

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I just stumbled across an article on beefing up IIS: 10 tips from a former Solaris admin. Instead of simply adding to the “which is best – IIS or Apache?” discussion, the article takes a look at how IIS administrators can learn a few lessons from their Unix colleagues. It’s a few years old now but still worth a read.

Mini mouse (not the Disney variety)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

For some time now, I’ve been looking for a miniature mouse to take with me when I’m on the road and save my aching hands from the pain of trackpad/touchpoint. A former customer of mine has a fantastic IBM optical 3-button travel wheel mouse, but at the time I looked into getting one it was too expensive. Then, yesterday I was in PC World (sorry… it was an emergency) and I saw an optical 2-button mini-mouse which was both inexpensive and “different”. A £9.99 optical mouse coloured like a bee!

My son loves it (even though, at just over one-year old, he doesn’t understand what it is, he was soon holding it correctly and clicking). My wife thinks it is cute. I just like it and find it remarkably easy to use, despite its diminutive proportions.

Starting the new year with a competition

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

For many of us who work closely with Microsoft, product launch dates are often a bit of a lottery (and a closely guarded secret) but Microsoft EMEA have taken it all a step further by running a competition to guess the launch date for Windows Vista!

1st Prize is to attend the Vista launch event in the USA: a full package with entry, flight and 3 nights in a 4-star hotel. 2nd–4th prize winners will each receive a new Xbox 360. 5th–10th prize winners will receive an Xbox core system.

I’ve gone for 8th December 2006, but also have a feeling that date might be a bit late in the Microsoft product launch season (apparently there was some marketing science behind why SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 had to be launched in early November last year).

Find out more at the Windows Vista and Office “12” Beta Experience website.

Securing my wireless network

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week I wrote about upgrading my wireless network. It’s been running well since then, so this afternoon I decided to go ahead with stage 3 – configuring wifi protected access (WPA). As I haven’t set up a RADIUS server here, and to be honest, it would be overkill for a small network like mine, I decided to implement WPA-PSK (pre-shared key), as detailed in Steve Lamb’s post (and blogcast) on the subject.

Initially, it all went well, simply setting the access point to use WPA-PSK and defining a passphrase. Within a few minutes, I had entered the passphrase on two of my notebook PCs and all was working well (one using a Compaq WLAN MultiPort W200 and one using an Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG network connection) but then I hit some real problems. My wife’s PC (the whole reason for us having a wireless network) and my server were refusing to play with the access point displaying the following message when I selected the wireless network and entered the network key:

Wireless configuration

The network password needs to be 40 bits or 104 bits depending on your network configuration.

This can be entered as 5 or 13 ASCII characters or 10 or 26 hexadecimal characters.

This seemed strange to me – there was no mention of any no such restrictions when I set up the WPA-PSK passphrase (the network key). With one machine running Windows XP SP2 and the other running Windows Server 2003 SP1, WPA support shouldn’t have been a problem (I double-checked the server with the D-Link AirPlus DWL-520+ wireless PCI adapter and once I’d manually switched the properties to WPA-PSK using TKIP, I was able to enter the network key and connect as normal).

It seems that for some reason, the D-Link card had defaulted to using WEP, and sure enough, once I set it to use WPA-PSK, the network description changed from security-enabled wireless network to security-enabled wireless network (WPA).

So, three machines working, one to go.

I read in Kathryn Tewson and Steve Riley’s security watch: a guide to wireless security article that WPA is “both more secure and easier to configure than WEP, but most network cards made before mid-2003 won’t support it unless the manufacturer has produced a firmware update”. The problem machine was using a Compaq WL110 Wireless PC Card, which I was given around 2002/3 (when we first put in the 802.11b network) so it sounded plausible that I might need a firmware update. A little more googling turned up the does/can the WL110 support WPA? thread on the HP IT Resource Center which gave me the answer. No, there is no firmware upgrade (card support was dropped before the WPA specification was finalised), but if you download the Agere version of the drivers, and tell Windows XP that the WL110 is a 2Wire Wireless PC Card, WPA is available and it works (even inside the WL210 PCI adapter)!

So, that’s all done – a working, (hopefully) secure, wireless network, all for the price of a new access point.

Didn’t get far with Linux so trying Solaris 10 now

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Sun SolarisLast year, I blogged about how I was starting to look at Linux… well, I installed SUSE Linux but never really got much further. I didn’t like the interface, I didn’t like that all the tools had weird or mis-spelt names, and it all felt a bit amateur (Linux zealots, please don’t flame me).

Still wanting to have a play with a Unix-based system and rebuild some long-lost skills, I had another go a few nights back and installed the x86 version of Sun Solaris 10 (the idea being that I’ll get used to a real Unix system and then maybe take another look at Linux later). It took an age to install, but I do now have a running system. I’m sure I’ve missed some essential configuration somewhere, but I’ll find my way through! First impressions are good, and I’m very proud of myself for managing to successfully install the Macromedia flash plug-in for Mozilla just by following the readme file (believe me, extracting files from an archive, finding out where Mozilla is installed, and then successfully running the installer is a big deal for a Unix newbie, even if it does sound trivial).

I still need to use Windows on my everyday systems, but maybe I’ll move my e-mail and browsing at home over onto the Solaris box once I feel comfortable with it all (after a couple of weeks’ use I’m not over-impressed with Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows XP so changing e-mail clients again won’t really upset me). In the meantime, if anyone out there has any Solaris hints and tips, good ‘net resources, etc., I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Dealing with winmail.dat files

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few days back, a business contact e-mailed me a copy of a presentation as a .PDF file. No problems there, except that when it got to me (using the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client), it was called winmail.dat. I tried saving the file as a .PDF but Acrobat Reader didn’t like it so I had to do some googling to find out what to do with this strange file (I remember having problems with this during a migration from Pegasus mail to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook a few years back and we had to resort to using plain text e-mails until everyone had been migrated).

I found an article on the PC Hell website that not only explained the purpose of the winmail.dat file (used by Outlook Rich Text e-mails to carry the formatting information in transport-neutral encapsulation format), but also gave links to various programs that can process the winmail.dat file. One of these is Steve Beadle’s WMDecode utility, which successfully extracted my .PDF from the winmail.dat file.