A Pipe and a Keyboard

I get a couple of computer magazines on a monthly basis.  I may revise that now that the business is gone, but in the meantime…………

The last edition I received of one of the magazines came with a DVD attached with a three month trial of Kaspersky Internet Security.  It seemed like a reasonable package, and with three months to run, I felt I had nothing to lose.

I installed it, and it rather high headedly insisted that I remove my current antivirus package and switch off all firewalls.  I was prepared to live with that however, and let it do its business.

I must say, I was very impressed with its features.  It seemed to take a belt and braces approach which is not a bad thing.  For example, it would flash up any arriving email for my approval, and even then it would scan it.  If it was suspicious of any (legitimate) program, it gave the option of running that program in a sandbox, thus quarantining it.

The more I looked into the program, the more I liked what I saw and decided that I would let it run its three months, and then I would subscribe.

The next day, I went to open an application (I think it was Word) and it took an age.  I’m talking maybe five minutes to open.  This concerned me, and my first thought was that something had gone wrong and an errant program somewhere was hogging too much memory, despite all the warning lights being in the green.  I decided to reboot anyway, as that can’t do any harm.

Rebooting took about ten minutes.  This is a fairly clean machine with 2Gb of memory and a duel core Pentium, so rebooting should be slightly faster than that?

My next thought was that a virus had crept in while Kaspersky was installing.  I fired up a full scan.

Twenty minutes later, the scan gauge still showed 0% progress.

For the next few hours, work on the machine was next to impossible.  Simple operations, like opening Firefox took maybe ten minutes.  Something somewhere was obviously preventing anything from running.  By now I was getting worried.

I began to get a wee bit suspicious about my new found friend Kaspersky, so I removed it.

I reinstalled my old antivirus of choice – Avast, and rebooted.

It flew through the process!  Programmes loaded like lightening and all was well with the world again.

My machine has been running very happily since. 

My conclusions?

Alwil’s Avast – Thumbs up.  I’m sorry I doubted you.

Kaspersky – Excellent CD for playing Frisbee with the dog..

Filed under: Tech stuff on August 10th, 2009 | 10 Comments »

As readers of Head Rambles will know, I am in the process of relinquishing my VPS as I am shutting down my business, and that is a tad expensive to host a couple of sites.

While I am having great fun trying to break my new server [successfully, I might add] I still have all my old accounts sitting on the VPS, waiting to be moved.  This should happen at any time, but in the meantime I have this dreaded feeling that I am still responsible for them, despite all the emails saying I had quit at the end of last month.

I received a mail last night from a client.  They were having trouble with their mail, and for once they gave a detailed analysis of the problem [which beats the hell out of “I can’t send mail – fix it please”].  It took me two seconds to Google the error report they sent – an Outlook problem.

I was delighted to receive that mail.  It reminded me why I am getting out of the business. 

While some clients had genuine problems, the majority seemed to think that it was perfectly acceptable to fire me an email at eight in the evening rather than go to the trouble of seeing what the problem really was, and whether it was my problem at all.

Having just moved servers to a new and completely unfamiliar control panel, I am having a lot of problems of my own.  When something goes wrong, I try to fix it myself.  If I can’t do that, I search the Internet to see if anyone is having similar problems.  If that fails, I go to my last resort – the Blacknight support team.  They are exceptionally helpful there and will go out of their way to explain things.  However, they do not want their time wasted with trivial complaints and queries and I respect that.

I replied to my client.  I sent a mail pointedly saying that I had found the answer straight away with a simple search.  I also politely reminded them that I have shut up shop.  I finished off with a chatty note about my retirement and how I was looking forward to peace and quiet with no one mailing me with trivial problems late in the evening.

I wonder if they got the hint?

Filed under: Tech stuff on August 6th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

For some time now, I have been concerned at the slow loading of Head Rambles.

There have been complaints of timeouts and load times running into the minutes, and that is not good.

During the week, I decided to make a concerted effort to get to the bottom of the problem. 

The problem has to lie in one (or more) of several areas -

• Plugins
• Embedded third party code
• The database
• Unwieldy theme coding

In order to be able to carry out tests without disrupting the site, I created a new site from scratch.  I then imported the theme from the live site and tried to import the database.  The latter was a rather tricky operation, and the tables were extremely large.  The comments table alone ran to 10Mb, which must say something, though I’m not sure what?  Also there are a lot of obscure characters in the database that parse correctly in the live site, but not the copy.  That is something that has to be investigated.

The new site is at http://grandad.ie if anyone is interested.

I have started work on a new theme for it, which is trimmed down to the bare necessities.  There is still some work to be done on it, so don’t complain about broken graphics just yet……

I have removed all embedded code and there are no plugins activated yet.

Both sites seem to be loading fairly quickly at the moment, which is annoying.  Perhaps you can tell me differently?

And if anyone has any idea on those strange characters (“don’t” instead of “don’t” for example) I would be very grateful.

Filed under: Tech stuff on July 30th, 2009 | 10 Comments »