I’ve been doing a little free web-development for some pals of mine, and, in the course of that, trying to get their website towards the top of all search-engine’s results.
So I was interested when a few days ago they had a call from a company that claimed that given a few keywords, they could guarantee to get them at the top of Google’s search results.
Hmmm, interesting!
When I told my pals that I doubted the credibility of such a claim [I got starry-eyed stares when I tried to explain to them the why of this], I thought I’d best have a look at what this company was offering.
In a nutshell, this company has got a Google AdWords account, and in using it, they will, for a few pounds, place you at the top of a Google search – you know, in those ‘Sponsored Link’ bits.
Ok, so what’s the problem with that?
1.
Well they’re charging £20 per month – which is just enough to have most people say ‘well it’s not that much’ [and sign-up], yet either over or under what placing a top-result will actually cost you.
If you don’t know, Google ads ‘pay’ [Google] and ‘cost’ [you] whenever someone clicks them. How much? It depends upon a figure that you’ll have to agree with Google [it depends upon other bidders], and that fits within your budget – so here we’re talking about £20 per month apparently.
So what if you spend all your budget? Well, you disappear from the results … rather, you slide to the place where Google’s PageRank algorithm would normally place you [which may be nowhere of course!]
So this company hopes that to place you will cost maybe a penny per click, and that for your 20 quid they’ll have some left over at the end of the month to pocket for themselves [that’s 2,000 people clicking through - so they probably will!]. But what if you go ‘over budget’? Well, I assume they’ll either get you to stump up a bit more, or simply hope that you don’t notice your sudden disappearing act!
2.
Who clicks ads?
Well, there must be a lot of people that do, because that’s Google main source of revenue I believe!
Personally however, I rarely click them – for one thing, they’re mostly sat off to the right-hand side of the search results, so I don’t see them [I assume that the best payers are the ones that appear at the top of the search results – rather than towards the right-hand side].
But the main reason I don’t click them is because Google’s PageRank works very well, i.e., websites that rank highly via PageRank are normally worth looking at – as they’re effectively being voted for by others that link to them [see the link I just used above - well, according to Google, I've just voted for the webpage that explains PageRank]. However, is that true when someone pays to get themselves at the top of the results? Probably not! After all, if they were actually first-rate – worth looking at – wouldn’t they get there by themselves – through their own merit, osmosis – call it what you will? I think so.
The result is that the more savvy person will often not rate/trust a paid-for link – or at least not as much as one that makes it to the top through its own merit.
3.
Who will see the advert/link?
Well, maybe lots of people/maybe no one:
You’ll see it if:
- the paying customer’s monthly budget hasn’t been used up when you conduct your search;
- IF – and only if – you use Google!
Yup – no one will see it it they don’t use Google – perhaps they use Yahoo, or some other search-engine [Ask.com, A9.com, Live.com, …] – no-Google = no-Where to be seen.
Watched 21 last night – not a bad film, in fact, regarding entertainment vs. cost value [it ran us just £3 from Matalan!] it was rather good.
The film is based upon the MIT Blackjack team, and as I’ve read/and-seen quite a lot about them before, I was quite happy to have the film thicken the plot [maybe that should be 'have one'?] – and there’s a nice twist or two at the end. As to the film’s inspiration, you can’t do much better than watch the BBC Horizon documentary on this:
Making Millions the Easy Way
I wish ‘Oxford types’ would get up to stuff like this [of course, they might do (would they tell their lecturers?)]; it’d be so much more fun!
Probability
I was quite pleased to see some probability stuff in the film being partially explained, i.e., their running through the Monty Hall problem [although the implied cleverness of the student here is a bit hard to swallow really].
Anyway, here’s the problem:
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the other two, goats. You pick a door, say number 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind all of the doors, always opens another door – to reveal a goat – let’s say that’s door number 3. He then says to you, “Do you want to swap?”, i.e., swap your initial choice of door number 1, and change to door number 2? The crux being – is it to your advantage to swap?
In the film, the problem is presented in this clip. By the way, the answer is in this too, so if you want to think about it, get ready to hit the pause button at the 44s mark!
The explanation I find that works quite well here [and I've had my Oxford stats students scratching their heads over this problem initially (as do most people I believe)] is:
Given this scenario: when you pick a door, you’re more likely to pick a goat-door than sole car-door, i.e., you’ve a probability of .66 [or 66% chance if you prefer] of picking one of the two goat-doors vs. the only car-door. Hopefully, that’s obvious.
So, if chance [substitute luck of the draw/fate/the odds/divine-intervention ...] did the right thing here, and you picked a goat-door, you know with a decent probability that the car is behind one of the two remaining doors – but which one? Now, when the host reveals another goat behind one of the two remaining doors, the car’s obviously [again, if the odds etc worked for your initial pick] behind the other door!
Basically, it comes down to this: if you picked a goat-door initially [which you will 66% of the time], by swapping later, you’ll always win the car. Conversely, and given once again that you initially picked a goat-door, if you don’t swap, you’ll lose 66% of the time. Or, one other way … by swapping, you’ll only lose if you picked the sole car-door as your first pick [which you're likely not to have done].
Update: Just found a nice little simulator of this [Internet Explorer only] at http://www.grand-illusions.com/simulator/montysim.htm
I hate gaming/gamers! Probably because A) I can’t see the point [read a book, go for a walk, ...], and B) because two people I [thought I] knew very well are very sadly addicts – one for The Sims [or practically anything else that might distract them from normality/life], and the other for the World of Warcraft [where she's a kiss-ass Elf, or some such shite!]. Oh, and C), my twelve-year-old son also plays too much! Sad individuals indeed. I truly can’t see the point.
Anyway, rant over, my son received a one month’s free trial on XBox [Saddoes] Live – or some such thing – and asked me if I could get his XBox 360 to connect to the Internet. As he’s in a room where there’s no wired network point, this meant doing it via a wireless connection.
So, on checking out the various sockets on the back of the 360 box, I tried connecting the thing using a LinkSys USB wireless adapter I had laying around. It didn’t work, and upon further reading, I’m led to believe that one requires a special Microsoft adapter.
That’s the bad news.
Now for the good news … if you’ve a wireless laptop, that also has a wired network-interface, there’s a workaround:
1. Connect your laptop to the Internet, via its built-in wireless;
2. Connect your XBox to your laptop, via a standard network cable [one is supplied with an XBox 360];
3. Bridge the laptop’s wired and wireless connections.
So, here’s the steps I went through on my ThinkPad [with XP installed]:
1. Boot/connect the machine to the network, via its wireless;
2. Connect the XBox to the ThinkPad’s wired network interface using a standard network cable;
3. Open your laptop’s Network Connections [Start | Control Panel | Network Connections];
4. Select both the wireless and wired connections;
5. Right-click on the selected connections, and select Bridge
Here’s the result:
And that was it: son-networked, playing even more games … hmmmmm – did I do the right thing?
There are a few websites that really piss me off – in that I cannot get Firefox to remember my username/password on them. Ok, I understand why they’ve taken steps to prevent one from doing so, but, as I’m quite confident that I’ve secured my saved passwords, it pisses me off.
Anyway, here’s how to fix the ‘problem’.
1. Locate Firefox’s installation folder. Normally that’s C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
2. Navigate to the components folder.
3. Open nsLoginManager.js in an editor. As Notepad won’t do really, do this instead [if you've a proper editor, just go to step 4]:
3a) Select Start | Run
3b) Enter cmd <enter or Ok>
3c) type cd C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components <enter>
3d) type edit nsLoginManager.js <enter>
3e) Go to step 4.
4. Find this:
/*
* _isAutoCompleteDisabled
*
* Returns true if the page requests autocomplete be disabled for the
* specified form input.
*/
_isAutocompleteDisabled : function (element) {
if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
return true;
return false;
},
5. Change it to this:
/*
* _isAutoCompleteDisabled
*
* Returns true if the page requests autocomplete be disabled for the
* specified form input.
*/
_isAutocompleteDisabled : function (element) {
return false;
},
6. Save the file [if you're following the 3x) steps above, select File | Exit, and when asked if you want to save the edited file, answer Yes. To close the command prompt, enter exit <enter>].
Note that you might first have to change the file’s security permissions to do this [you DO if the save fails]. E.g., in Vista I had to A) right-click on the file [e.g., in Explorer] B) select Properties | Security. B) select Edit. C) select your username, D) change the persmissions to include Write access.
And you’re done – either start, or close/re-start Firefox!
n.b. If you want to know ‘why’ this works, see http://www.w3schools.com/tags/html5_input.asp – then autocomplete, disabled
Basically, by making these changes you’re saying that any element may be ‘auto completed’; so if an input field on a page includes <input autocomplete=”off” … />, when Firefox checks, the field will appear to be marked autocomplete=”on” instead.
For ages, at every boot, I’ve run a small program called TempClean: all this really does is to clear my Temp folder of stuff that’s left over by programs that don’t clear up after themselves [like a man]. Ok, so it does a little bit more than that [unlike a man] – but that’s its main function.
Anyway, I’d be really interested in knowing how much litter [unwanted files] you have on your Windows machine, and so rather than ask you run the real TempClean [it doesn't have an installer - just save it somewhere and run it!] – which you might be unsure/wary off – here’s a small VBScript ‘script’ so that you can find 0ut for yourself. BTW, this doesn’t remove anything!
Here’s the code:
dim fso
dim fld
dim fle
dim l
set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
set fld = fso.GetSpecialFolder(2)
wscript.echo "Your Temp folder is set to: " & fld.path
sub walk(fld)
wscript.echo vbCrLf & "Looking in: " & fld.path
if fld.files.Count > 0 then
for each fle in fld.files
wscript.echo vbTab & "Found: " & fle.name
l = l + fle.size
next
else
wscript.echo vbTab & "No files found"
end if
for each fld in fld.SubFolders
walk(fld)
next
end sub
walk(fld)
wscript.echo vbCrLf & "The total bytes taken up by your temp files is: " & l
All you need to do to run this is:
- copy ‘n paste it into Notepad [or just download it here];
- save it as, say, tempfiles.vbs;
- run it from a Command Prompt [I'll assume you know how to open a Command Prompt, unlike a woman, to quote Colin Hay "or a woman, if you are one" ... ask a man"].
For example, if I’d saved it to my root folder on C, I’d run it like this, in a DOS/Command prompt:
C:\cscript tempfiles.vbs
BTW, cscript is a Microsoft VBScript interpreter that you’ll almost certainly have on your machine already.
Note again that running this script doesn’t remove anything – it just reports what you’ve got hanging around, and that’s taking up space unnecessarily. And, on that last bit, you might like to output the results of running this to a file – else the output might disappear off the top, never to reappear!
You could do that like this:
C:\cscript tempfiles.vbs > dump.txt
The > redirects the output into a file call dump.txt. So you can then open dump.txt in Notepad and have a look at what you’ve got hanging around – which you might find A) interesting, and B) a lot!!
BTW, if you’d like to remove these temporary files, you can just add either these two lines after the l = l + fle.size, e.g.
l = l + fle.size
on error resume next
fso.deletefile fle
Or, if you want to do a proper job [like a woman], download and run the real program [link to TempClean above].
Please post up your results, from whichever method, and in summary preferably!
Been playing around with Eclipse today.
It’s been a long time since I last used it, and I’m pretty pleased with all the improvements that have been made to it since I last looked.
However, that said, I did spend about an hour trying to resolve an error in a simple ‘Hello World’ type C project. The error was:
/mingw/lib/libmingw32.a … undefined reference to `WinMain@16′
The test file was simply:
#include
int main(void)
{
puts(“Boo”);
return 0;
}
I googled for the solution [as you do], and tried all manner of things suggested, including having to add libraries and linker/compiler flags. Nothing helped.
However, in playing around, I noticed that I hadn’t saved my source file; test.c file. Surely it can’t be anything as silly as not doing that? Surely the Eclipse IDE will automagically save my file before running the compiler?
You’ve guessed the answer already haven’t you! Yup, on saving the file, and THEN selecting Project | Build All, everything worked! Duh!
P.S. the above applies to version: 3.4.2 Build id: M20090211-1700. And with MinGW installed.
So, I’m a bit of a gadget freak, but not the type that would buy any gadget – simply because it seems, um, cool [Mmmm].
I saw Livescribe’s Pulse SmartPen on a ‘must have’ list I stumbled upon; and, as my partner and I are both academics – and as such, both ‘send’ and ‘receive’ lectures/talks, we thought it worth investigating, and, to cut a boring story short, we decided [well she did – she’s got the money!], to buy one – the BIG 2Gb model.
Unfortunately, Livescribe – who offer the best price on their own products [duh!] – don’t ship outside of the USA. Something you only discover once you’ve got into the ordering process; once it’s in your ‘cart’. So, suggestion to Livescribe – perhaps make this ‘crystal’ on the initial Buy page?
After shopping around, we found that a lot of places in the UK were ‘out of stock’, yet ‘expecting delivery soon’ – which means, IMHO, avoid like the plague! If a website doesn’t say something’s in stock, one should move along.
We eventually went and found the 2Gb model on bitesizedeals.co.uk and, ordered the 2GB Bundle for £199 – saving £50 apparently. Which, if really true, is a great deal!
A couple of days later, our Livescribe arrived in a very big box.
The box contained:
- 2Gb Pulse Smartpen [in a smaller box (above)]
- 3-D Recording Headset
- 5 x 200 sheet notebooks [dot paper], college-ruled, and colour coded
- USB mobile charging cradle
- Smartpen case
- 2 x 3 black fine point ink cartridges + 1 stylus cartridge
- Demo card and interactive stickers
- Interactive Getting Started Guide
Note there’s no software provided – other than what’s resident in the pen of course. For the PC/Mac side of things you go and get the Livescribe Desktop software as a download.
The install of that was smooth, and the application looks and feels very professional.
I like software to be VERY intuitive [as I’m pretty sure you do], and so I never read a manual, unless I just can’t progress through simply figuring it out. I’ll have more on this aspect of the desktop software later.
When the pen was first attached, I went and found ‘Check for Updates’, and there were lots:
Sorry that’s a little small, but to get an idea of how many there are, notice the size of the scrollbar on the right of the list.
However, this is good news! I.e., it’s nice to know [or at least suspect] that Livescribe are keen to improve their product; and, as they do that, issue lots of updates. Of course, one could also take another view: that Livescribe ship buggy software – that is problematic, been reported n times, and, as a result, have been forced to make a very large number of changes to its product! I never tried the pen with whatever versions of things it came packed with [so can’t comment on whether it seemed buggy at all], but I take the former of the two views expressed above. And hey, why would you want to use a product’s software ‘as is’ when there are updates available; which will surely only improve things?
Anyway, the update was smooth.
So, now to try it!
The pen comes with a tutorial/quick-start thingmy which was well worth working through – and I won’t describe it here, and instead show you a picture of me working through it!
The tutorial was easy to follow, smooth, and, I think, pretty much walked you through everything you need to know to get ‘fully functional’.
Be sure to watch the videos of how the pen and the software works here – use the thumbnails at the bottom of the page to walk-through more-or-less everything to do with this gadget.
Ok, so in summary, the pen is awesome! A truly remarkable and wonderful tool that I would recommend purchasing to anyone that takes notes.
But …
Criticisms: I have but 3 [so far].
1. The desktop software is, IMHO, not *that* intuitive – and I still find my self clicking on non-functional items – and/or ‘right clicking’ on things to bring up a context-menu that simply don’t exist. For example, to remove an item from the desktop software, or the pen, you have to highlight the item and then use the top-level menu to select the deletion option. This really should be on a menu accessed via right-clicking on an item.
The desktop software seems well written, i.e., it’s ultimately functional, but, for me, well, it just doesn’t really satisfy.
2. It seems to me that there is an obvious missing feature. You can tansfer your files to your Livescribe Desktop, and from there transfer them to your shared space on Livescribe’s own website via Livescribe Online [a really cool feature]. However, you cannot transfer files *back* to the pen once they’ve been moved off of it! And that’s just dumb!
Ok, so with a 2Gb pen it might be a rare event – to move things off to make space – but, if you do, you’ll be stuck with never being able to use your hand-written notes with the pen ever again. A few other people have noted their own surprise at this missing feature on Livescribe’s forum pages, and it seems that it might yet appear at some future date. And that would be great!
3. Livescribe Technical Support seem to take around 24 hours to respond to queries. Ok, so I only had two ‘trips’ to the support email address, but that was what I found – it’s sloooow!
–
Link: a YouTube search featuring the Livescribe Smartpen.
Link: google search for ‘Livescribe review’.
I bought a new machine a couple of months ago – the first new one for me in around 7 years; so it was *really* getting to be about time! The old one was ok, but the hard-drive was starting to have problems … not a worry though, as I keep things backed-up. And, being a developer – who doesn’t play games [except chess!], it wasn’t as though I needed some massive clock-cycle, or graphics boost to keep me happy [happiness is a hot compiler, and an understanding woman!]
Anyway, I opted for an HP: a nice, very fast Intel dual-core with 4Gb of memory and a 600Gb hard-drive.
BUT, last week, its hard-drive started having problems – ‘bad blocks’ [Seagate!] Luckily, I got more-or-less everything off it that I cared about – partly because I keep most important stuff on an external drive.
I now have two 1Tb Samsung SATA drives – well, the second one is coming tomorrow; and it’ll be mostly used in a RAID configuration!! Plus, whereas the HP came with Vista Business, I’ve now put Ultimate on it [about time I used that expensive DVD!] I actually love Vista … but, saying that, I run most everything in VMs; courtesy of Sun’s VirtualBox [don't want to upset Vista in any shape or form!]
“Daily Scans are Pointless” – to the tune of “Every Sperm is Sacred”!
I’m a real fan of AVG’s anti-virus [AV], but for the life of me I can’t understand why, by default, it wants to do a daily scan.
“Please note that by default, the Whole Computer Scan is already scheduled to run every day.”
Actually, I should briefly ‘back up’ and say that until fairly recently, I actually rated most AV programs as next to useless, and that it’s the operating system that should ‘get more a grip’ on protecting its users! I wrote a piece on this for Computer Weekly back in 2002 – although I can’t remember if it was published [I was doing ‘Thought for the Day’ things for them back then]. Anyway, I’ll post that in another article and link to it here.
Back to ‘scanning’ then!
Any decent AV program hooks into the operating-system and scans a file for viruses, etc. whenever it’s accessed. Therefore, why do a scan? If a file is infected, but not being accessed, why worry about it?
Of course, it may be that you’ve got a virus in some file, and yet it’s only recently that your AV’s been trained to recognise it [see the other article], but again, what’s the problem there? I repeat: if an infected file’s not being accessed, why worry about it – when and if it is accessed, it’ll be caught.
Think about how many AVG installations there are in the world. Think about how many people go with the default ‘scan every day’ option. Think about how much energy that uses! Think about all of the other AV vendors that also do daily scans by default now!
Also, and anyway, scanning on any modern Windows machine could be greatly speeded up because the operating-system can keep a journal of exactly what’s changed on a drive – that’s over reboots too. This technology has been there since Windows 2000, so why scan everything anyway? Only scan what’s been changed/added if you want to find ‘new stuff’ – but again, why even bother with that? Wait until an infected file is accessed – and fix it then!
This missive from 2002 is here simply because it’s referenced from this.
Or, was it this? Dunno … I’m as ‘confused’ as normal!
Antivirus programs cannot truly protect you and, at worst, lure you into a false sense of security; and, I’ll tell you why…
The State of ‘Play’ Today:
• Way back, computer-viruses were transmitted via floppy disk – slowly, from one machine to another.
If the virus was known, and the destination machine had an up-to-date anti-virus program on it, further spread could be prevented as an infected file was accessed.
• Then came networks – but these too could be kept reasonably safe, so long as the ‘entry-point’ (floppy disk-drive) onto that network was protected – as above.
• Then came the Internet – in lots of ways the Internet is just a big network – the ‘EWAN’ – the ‘Extraordinary-Wide-Area Network’. Now it’s getting kinda tricky to protect yourself.
The main thing is that, in order to catch a virus, your anti-virus program has to first know that it exists.
It’s like the way the Flu jab works – you get innoculated against the strain that is predicted to hit the country: not ‘the Flu’ per se. However, if a different strain hits you – well, you’ll get the Flu! Viruses – real or cyber – have signatures, and you can only be immunised against known entities.
With the Internet, it’s quite possible that you’ll get hit by a new strain before an antidote can be prepared by your anti-virus program’s vendor.
Take the way viruses use email programs to move themselves about nowadays – it goes like this:
• Someone gets a virus (somehow)
• It does its damage and then emails a copy of itself to everyone in his or her contacts-list/in-box, etc.
• When the recipients get it, it does the same for them – this is Exponential!
So, in no time at all, it spreads (successfully) like wildfire – as, remember, we’re pretty much all connected at the speed of light now – and your antivirus hasn’t been informed about this new strain yet!
Anyway, some poor soul ultimately discovers that this thing is a self-replicating virus – and (if they can be bothered – as it’s too late for them) they notify Norton, Symantec, AVG, blah blah blah. In a bit, they all confirm that it is indeed a virus, and work out a fix – time ticks by. They then issue this on their web-sites. Hopefully, you’ve got an ‘Active Update’ kind of program running at your end (or do you have to periodically check for updates yourself!?), and quite soon (this is usually based on a pull rather push model – so you probably update once in 24 hours) you’ll get the fix! However, will it all be too late when it arrives? You bet ya! The likelihood of this is almost certainly proportional to the value of your data of course!
So, are anti-virus programs really worth having? Well, broadly speaking, I say ‘no’. What’s needed is better technology – viruses could be caught by the operating-system – and they should be!
In order for a virus to work, it needs to be executed: either directly, or by some other already-executing-process. Now, the operating-system is the thing that creates processes; and as such it can learn what they access. So, if the operating-system were a bit more picky about what processes it’ll start ‘automagically’, well … these things could be caught very effectively.
Imagine, you double-click what looks like an Excel file-attachment appearing in your email. However, the operating-system sees that the file is actually an executable. Next, it checks to see if this executable has been run on your machine before and, if it hasn’t, it simply asks you – “Are you sure you want to run this PROGRAM?”. You answer ‘no way’. Problem solved. How about if the virus infects Excel itself – and runs as some sort of extension to the program though? Well, hopefully you’ll have run Excel a few times before, and the operating system can learn about its habits? For example, should Excel now try to access your Firefox settings, or start trawling your folders for a Microsoft Money file, one would hope that the operating system might think that this is all a bit peculiar, and ask you about it [suspending Excel while it consults you of course].
Alternatively, this kind of approach – where the operating-system is rather more proactive – could be extended to anything that has write-access to your hard disk. After all, no write-access = no-damage [writing to a port, i.e., writing ‘across the wire’ is a write operation of sorts, and as such is not permitted]!
Written in 2002
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