Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

Why use a Server OS as a workstation OS?

For the last couple of months, I’ve been using Windows Server 2008 R2 as my main desktop operating system. One or two have questioned me to why I’ve done this and to why I’m not running Windows 7.

First of all, I’d like to point out that I have used Windows 7, and it’s my primary OS on my Laptop. I do still find serveral issue’s with the OS, including slow downs and memory management issue’s. But overall – still, better than Vista.

So why use Server 2k8?

The bare basics of an operating system – no junk and bloated and useless software pre-installed.
Better memory management and organisation of background services.

If you don’t believe me – have a look at some of the articles below showing the performance of Server 2008 to other Microsoft operating systems.

Windows “Workstation” 2008 – Vista Done Right?

Massive benchmark comparison between Windows XP, Vista and 2008 Server, 32- and 64-bit

From those to articles, you can see there is a performance increase if your using vista, for certain – even an upgrade to 7 is worthwhile if your still running Vista.

I find personally that 2K8 is much more responsive and quicker than Windows 7 and seems in general a lighter operating system. It works well for me, so give it a shot.

You can download it free and try it for 180 days from Microsoft – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/try-it.aspx

Woocha, WGET!

Occasionally, my ISP (BT) does lack in connection speed. It’s not necessarily their fault, but one of the links or bridges connecting is slow. I was downloading some large mixes that a friend had done on his server, but I was only getting 40KB/s on a 200mb file, slow. I thought about it, and was wondering how I can use my dreamhost server to my advantage. I asked a couple of friends, and a mate, William told me about the SSH function, wget.

WGET tells the server to download a file of another server. As my dreamhost server sits in a huge data center with huge pipes hooked up to it I can hit speeds that I can only dream of. I know that I can hit high speeds when downloading files from my server, roughly 700KB/s – which is nearly topping out my home internet connection. Once I told the server what to download, i was hitting file transfer rates on 10MB/s on some (server to server).

So how do we go about downloading files then?

First we need to SSH into our server;

user@example.com - then we enter our password once prompted.

once we are logged in – simply type

“wget [insertthefilelocation]”

SSH Tunnel Proxy

SSH Socks Proxy – Being Secure Online Occasionally, some services like us to be in the presence of America to use their service, or our internet service is down maybe. Maybe your on a unknown wifi channel and want to give yourself a bit more security. Eh? A proxy in otherwords? Yes, that’s essentially really what we are doing – for those are confused by a proxy – it’s the middleman between you and the location that you are trying to reach.

Today, i’m going to show you how to use SOCKS, or a SSH Proxy. Now, you will need a web host for this, and it needs to have SSH support for this. I know MediaTemple & Dreamhost do – check with your host just to make sure.

We’ll be doing on this a mac and using Firefox as our browser, so first we need to open the terminal – for those who don’t know where that is: Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal Now we need your username and address of your server. ssh -ND 9999 you@example.com

Now, of course you replace this with your credentials which you should. It will then ask you for your password, you should also know this too. For dreamhost – this is the same as your default FTP details.

After you have entered your password, it will not print anything else – it’s job is done and ready. Setting up FireFox to work with your SSH Proxy.

If everything looks like that, then were good to go! Hit ok, and so if you can load the start of FireFox. I hope you find this helpful, it’s works for me and I find it useful at WiFi hotspots where sometimes you don’t feel secure. If you have another medthod, please leave a comment or send me an email.

iTunes: Criminals Best Friend

My mother was recently caught up in some unfortunate credit card fraud. Unknown to her until she received a bill from her credit card company charging her a not-nasty 102. Been she knew that they she hadn’t gone to thecarphone warehouse and spent any amount there. She immediately phoned them up enquiry into possible credit card fraud, turns out to be true. But how? As my title says, iTunes. The fraudsters (as i call them’) used iTunes to purchase one track from iTunes for 79p, if it works, they’ll go for something bigger this being a phone (I’m guessing) from the carphone warehouse.

Its how the criminals used iTunes to punch numbers until they got one that worked is a little disturbing to me! I was expecting her to get it copied in some ATM that she had been to, but obviously not. I think iTunes needs to step on the security. We have emailed Apple discussing our concerns but i have not yet received a reply. Its quite simply shocking how the worlds biggest online music store can be used for Credit Card Fraud. It seems like Apple does not like the surnameBayliss. My laptop going on fire was bad enough, but now credit card fraud on iTunes? What ever next.

Updated: BT Home Hub

This article may be of no use to you, if thats the case – go rumage through my archives!

I recently received a telephone call from BT, asking if we could like to take the offer of a lower priced broadband package and a free digital picture frame. I took up on that offer, i knew what it was straight away. It was an extension of the contract on our broadband package.

I was happy, i wasn’t planning on changing any time soon. I also got offered a BT Home Hub, which is your standard ISP router, (Its a speed-touch renamed, made by thompson) – I received the hub last Thursday, and i can happily say, its fab! No connection drops over wireless, no ADSL connection drops, great speeds, functional and a happy NAT. Works like magic through Xbox Live. And all of this is better than a £80 netgear modem? (DG834N). I’m seriously impressed with it.

The last model of it, was shoddy, and a stupid one. It never worked correct – but this model has really stepped up. BT doesn’t have a good reputation over here – many people don’t have broadband, many have broadband the speed of GPRS. I’m not one of them, i get a good 5mb down (which is good for my location) and a nasty 350kb/s upload (this is the same for everyone). I’m not un-happy until they start shaping me during the evening which every ISP does to handle requests and bandwidth.

The Official DSA Theory Test, for PC.

I recently purchased the DSA (official) Theory test from Amazon to only find out that it is Windows only. I’m not the only one who is having this issue. For us who have – macs this is an issue, there are work arounds but thats not the point. There is a large share of Mac based users and there a thousands of students like me probably in the same position. I personally sent an email to the DSA (obviously – they didn’t make it, a side company did) and i haven’t recieved a reply as yet, although if i do – i will update back. Yes - I’m upset that a government based company has not realised that Vista is not the only operating system that they should be working towards and that OSX has a good old’ place in the world now.

The only possible way for me to do this is either using a Virtual Machine or Bootcamp – Now, unless you have a copy (yes, a real legal, legit copy) you are kinda stumped. Luckily i have a copy of Vista lying around which i won in a competition. I personally went for the Bootcamp approach – its the simply the most organised. VMWare’s Fusion can boot the Bootcamp partition which is ace to an extent but then your system does slow down. It maybe the fact that i don’t have enough RAM (2GB Standard).

Are you having the same issue? Large companies that are not providing software for your operating system that is getting bigger everyday?

Review: Asus Striker Extreme

This is a short one, very short.

I had this Motherboard one day – and one day only. I never even got to use it, i opened the box and installed it. I was excited to use really use the power and features. I never got to use those features.

The board was faulty. Shame, look at the reviews on any site and you’ll see “Excellent, and great value!”. I never found a bad one so thats why i purchased it. I later found out to my mistake that it was a bad purchase. Seems like everyone that is purchasing it is having the same issue or at least a similar one. Its known as “CPU INIT” and all you need to do is a quick google to find hundreds of results leading to sites and forums all trying to work out a fix for it. It seems to me to be the ram, but its standard Corsair (2×2GB, 800MHz, 6400) RAM. But you can’t even attempt to get into the bios because it won’t boot and i haven’t got any other ram. For that reason alone i returned it – thanks eBuyer! – When i speaking to ebuyer on the phone, and the great chap on the phone told me that they have lots of problems with this board and if you get one that doesn’t do this, then you’ve got a good one.

I’ve now gone for Intel’s new X48 board, The Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ6. I’ve been seeing some great reviews coming from sites and the X38 was very successful so I’m hoping its going to be a great experience.

iPhone Predictions

Seems like every Apple and Technology blog is talking about it. So i’ve decided to talk about it.

I’m personally not overly fused with getting a new iPhone. I’m quite happy with my current one and the only time I use Safari is when I’m in town and i get free Wi-Fi then? Object defeated really? Yes. The fact is, i still have an iPhone – as soon as that word is mentioned someone is interested and wants to play your magical phone.

Hardware: One thing I would like to see from the new iPhone is a decent camera with an autofocus lens and a better sensor. The current generation iPhone’s camera is OK, but can be acceptable to blurriness in most situations. Better battery life – oh yes please. My phone last’s a day normally, thats with calls, texts and browsing its rather pathetic. My Samsung i600 lasted a good couple of days. Interaction with Applications Better user interface and interaction with Application. The iPhone is not particularly flexible and does limit you in certain applications. I believe this is because Apple doesn’t want you to have options to fiddle and play with.

Apple likes simplicity and thats the way that it should be. But if your like me and like fiddle (and normally brake stuff) you would really appreciate some advanced features. There is no doubting that there is a 3G iPhone and it could be even HSDPA.

I don’t know if my next phone will be an iPhone as i like a generic keyboard. Yes, i’m basically saying that i want a proper phone when it comes around.

I’m like look the look of the Blackberry Bold – but this then poses the question of what happens when your iPhone’s contracts runs out? Does it go to pay as your go (prepaid)? Do you sell it on? What happens when you want to de-activate it? I’d like to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Picturesque – Gorgeous Post Images

Writing a blog post and have post images? Trying to make those images interesting can be a though job, but not with Picturesque from Acqualia. It has recently updated and has improved features with version 2.0! Making your images look gorgeous and shown off with style.

User Interface

When you first open Picturesque you are presented with a clean and presentable UI, and it simply says “Drop your images here”. There is an option of using the apple media browser which contains your iPhoto & Aperture library and has the same drag and drop concept.

Once you have your image inside of the application, you have lots of choices and options that you can apply to your images.

Effects

Perspective – for angles. Reflections – for a mirror image underneath. Shadow – for a glowing effect. Curve – It removes standard corner, giving it a cool, curvey corner. Stroke – which allows you to simply add a border.

Picturesque has a preset button so you can easily apply the effects that you have used, the next time that you open Picturesque. It really does save me time allowing me to process a batch of images and apply the same effect. It also has compatibility with Applescript allowing you to run a workflow. This application was obviously thought up with bloggers in mind who need a quick and easy alternative to photoshop! Picturesque can be purchased directly from Acqualia software for $34.99

Thanks to Zac Cohan from Acqualia who kindly allowed me to review Picturesque.

UPDATE – I have posted a quick demo on YouTube.

RSS Weapons

With every website today you will find an RSS or a way to keep up to date on the site’s newest content – you then easily subscribe and every time the site updates you’ll get a little notification alerting you that there is a new article for grabs. Subscribe to mine and see how it works!

There are lots of dedicated Applications on the marketplace that can do this, both being free and paid alternatives.

NewsNetWire – Free.

I found this Application when RSS was coming around. It was starting to become evermore popular. NNW syncs with an online server allowing you to visit your RSS on your iPhone and iPod Touch, how cool is that? It even allows you to add bookmarks to delicious. I don’t personally use this reader, but i recommend it anyday. The interface is clean, easy and good looking which lots organsation and customisation.

NewsFire – Free.

NewsFire has been a fairly big player in the RSS World, with people such as Kevin Rose using it. I love News Fire’s User Interface. Easy to use and works with Podcast RSS feeds and allows you to play them inside the application. The organisation of feeds is unfualtalbe and is customisable to your delight. There isn’t any support for the iPhone or iPod touch but i’m not to fussed. I personally use this app and i love it!

Times – $30

The most newest player on the market. The developer Dustin MacDonald is most famous for his app – Wallet, which I will review at a later date. When I first heard the title I thought it was from the News paper we have over here in the UK “The Times” – but I was incorrect. It has the layout of the Times newspaper with articles and tabs allowing you to select which category you want to read. It is fully customisable allowing you to change what news you read and from what site. Times comes with preset sites such a cnet, engadget and gizmodo. An extra cheeky feature that Times has is to remove ads, thats right – ads. Many sites have the “Full Content with ads”, times uses witchcraft and removes these pesky ads making me a happy bunny. One thing, this app is not iPod and iPhone happy.

Overall

Out features, price and quality. There will be no other application experience like Times, i do feel that $30 is a little over priced, but may justify over-time. NewsFire is still the RSS Reader for me I’m afraid. I like how it organises, displays feeds and how its simple and easy to use.

Older Entries