Allow me to disagree. For those who’ll begin by claiming it costs too much, let me direct you to AVG, or many other free antivirus and firewall packages that will happily do the job for years without a single push towards locking you out if you’re not willing to pay. Go to the site, hit the download link, go play Party Poker Romania or update your Facebook while it downloads, install, and you’re done!

People can set up WordPress blogs and repair broken servers, but when it comes to taking care of their personal details, they’d be better suited to simply giving them to someone else for safekeeping. The reason for this is that they’re not familiar with the sort of people who are after their details, and a large part of avoiding risking your bank login info will come to you through the amazing medium of Common Sense.

You see that Nigerian prince you’re emailing back and forth with about his countless millions that he’ll be giving you to keep an eye on? He’s not real! You see that weird looking email from your bank? Not real! The reason so many people lose their details is because they’re not surfing suspiciously, and they should be. I’m not saying heavy paranoia is good for you, but a healthy dose of it will go a long way to ensuring you’re not fishing your savings out of another account after Prince Abaga takes your wages. Good luck, and use your sense, firewalls and antivirus!

After spending few hours trying to connect, changing all the settings in the router, restarting the router like hell, I was about to reinstall the OS on that laptop. But as I never worked on Vista, I thought google-ing a bit might reveal similar experiences. And yes, I was so right… one of the first results was stating:

This issue occurs because of a difference in design between Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). Specifically, in Windows XP SP2, the BROADCAST flag in DHCP discovery packets is set to 0 (disabled). In Windows Vista, the BROADCAST flag in DHCP discovery packets is not disabled. Therefore, some routers and some non-Microsoft DHCP servers cannot process the DHCP discovery packets.

The simplest thing you have to do is disabling Broadcast on your wi-fi card, by setting the REG_DWORD key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID}\ DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag to 0, where GUID is your wi-fi card ID.

Other options plus the description of the whole story is available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us

… and yes, the problem is solved in Windows 7.

Good luck!

I am proud not to put all kind of garbage on my blog, proud of most my posts and proud that I kept my interest in this so many years. And yes, I want this coffee mug:

First I downloaded and unarchived subversion:

Since the last versions are requiring SQLite, I had to download and copy one file from sqlite folder to subversion folder:

Configure, make and install:

Then creating a repository:

Create a template for my projects and initialize repository:

Create users inside authz file and add them to svnserve.conf. You might want to set anonymous permissions to none.

Access your svn via internet with:

Voila!

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There was a post on Google blog saying they are now offering twice the space for quarter the price. I went immediately to my account and saw that I now have 80 GB of quota !!

… and the first option is to buy 20 GB for $5 ! Long live Google !

One funny thing here: check the “round” prices for bigger plans: $512, $1024, $2048….

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Last week I had a discussion with someone in Oracle about Real-Time Decision (RTD) Server and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), so I decided to find out first all the capabilities of Google Analytics.
After half of day of reading the course materials on Google Conversion University, I decided that a challenge might worth 50$, so I took the exam.

More than an hour later I passed the 70 questions exam, much difficult than I expected, with a score of 87%:

Now having the proof I understood correctly what’s happening with Google Analytics, I can jump into conclusions:

• GA it’s a great piece of software for analyzing trends, keywords and content.
• GA it’s staying on another server than your web server and the communication is uni-directional. This means GA will get information about your site, but you cannot implement real-time decisions based on GA
• GA it’s free, same Urchin, so if you own a blog or have a small budget, these will be your choices
• Both RTD Server and RUEI are licensed products with a price per processor over 80K USD, which makes them a choice just for big enterprises
• RTD Server will be able to serve real-time content based on your behavior, just like Amazon is doing
• GA is not able to track 404-pages, loading times, code execution times

To summarize: if you’re big, go with RTD and/or RUEI. If you’re not so big, stay with GA, Urchin or other free stuff like them.

Related posts:

Example:

Europe countries I visited so far

People say that one picture worth more than a thousand words. This is true: just change, or offer charts as alternative to your long and boring tables and you’ll see the result.

What have I done here:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?

• chs=440×220 *dimensions – this is the maximum size for maps
• chd=t:100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100, 100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100,100 *color levels, one per child (chld)
• cht=t *some default parameter for maps
• chtm=europe *if you want to show just a region
• chco=FFFFFF,FF0000,FFFF00,00FF00 *default color and color limits
• chf=bg,s,EAF7FE *if you want to add a background color for water
• chld=ROBGTRGRITHUESPTFRNLBECHDEATGBPLSLSKNOCZLVLTRUBAMKSIHRGRCYCS *list of children (countries here)

!Note: It seems that google does not map Serbia correctly. The last country listed there is Serbia (RS) and it is not shown on the map. Strangely, changing this to CS is working. Currently waiting for a response from google (from a human, not the search engine )

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It seems that driven by the cut-costs strategy they started to steal each other’s clients. Oracle just moved to Pearson VUE. The result for me as a customer, not as an Oracle employee, is that I cannot access my history. You have to believe me or to wait until Oracle will provide online transcripts when I will tell you what I own. There’s no history on their side, they claim the history will be kept on Oracle’s side at Certview, but I was unable to check my history.

I remembered I used Pearson VUE to take my Microsoft MCSD exams, so I tried to log in with my old credentials. Surprise…. Microsoft is no longer with Pearson, but they moved to Prometric. It’s totally confusing and you don’t want to take an exam these days

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Pidgin - Instant Messaging – Single client for all protocols, including Oracle internal one.

Launchy - Application Launcher – just press ALT+Space and write a few letters from app name to start it

MPlayer – Movie Player – no GUI, just console, very quick, no need to install codecs. Some issues with external monitor.

Firefox - of course, user since version 0.9 Beta

Dropbox - File Sync – simple sync of some folders between laptops or laptop and desktop. As a bonus files are stored online and you get revisions history

Google Mail – Personal Email – lot of space, even bought extra. Can also use it to read other POP3 accounts, all in a single interface.

Google Reader – RSS reader – the best RSS reader

Google Calendar – Calendar – simple to use, simple to share, to sync. Can also use it to read other calendars.

TripIt – Booking Manager – just forward all the travel plans to Tripit and you’ll have your itinerary ready, published as a web calendar, links to online check-in and other usefull stuff.

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After a short google search, I found PC Inspector Smart Recovery who did a brilliant job. Not very fast, but speed was not what I was looking for.
It managed to recover ~200 MB in less than 10 minutes, good enough for a FREE application.

Good luck!

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