In a bizarre show of logic this week, the Chinese Government has ruled that buddhist monks living in Tibet must seek government permission if they wish to reincarnate.
As this article points out, although the idea to prevent an spiritual act of faith which, should it be even possible, would be difficult prove or prevent is wholly absurd, it has an ulterior motive firmly grounded in the physical world. The aim is to control who the next Dalai Lama will be, since they can simply deny the current one the permission to reincarnate and hence his sole cannot be reborn.
It’s kind of clever in a pointless kind of way!
I recently started having a strange problem with Excel 2007. All of my regular financial spreadsheets have shortcuts on the desktop so they are always at hand. In the last 10 days I’ve had problems opening them from these links.
Double clicking on the shortcut opens Excel but no spreadsheet. If I click around between other applications including the open copy of excel a few times, the file will suddenly appear but If I leave it to it’s own devices it never opens. If I close Excel down before the file has opened I get a Windows error message telling me that it couldn’t find the file. If I open excel and then open any of the files from the recent files list, they open straight away even though they are the same files I’m trying to open from the desktop shortcuts!
Today, I accidentally stumbled across the solution to the problem. I loaded two shortcuts one immediately after the other which brought up two excel instances, one which appeared to be working, although it did not load the file, and another which was just a window frame and a white page. After a few seconds it was obvious nothing was going to load so I closed the crashed one down. Excel popped up a small progress bar as it tried to close and then the ‘normal’ looking excel window popped up a warning telling me that there was a Sage Excel add-in which was malfunctioning and did I want to disable it. Disabling it loaded the file immediately and now all of my shortcuts are working again!
As it happens I had upgraded our Sage Line 50 installatiion from v11 to v13 last week and hadn’t linked the excel problems to the same point in time. I had no idea there was even a Sage Excel add-in. I’ve never used it and I can see no reason why it would only cause problems for files being loaded from a shortcut. It seems it’s just one of those many little incompatibilities which creep in undetected.
I keep an eye on the blog of Dick Morrell who was the founder and creator of the Smoothwall firewall. Smoothwall was a revelation in internet security since you could simply install the software on an old PC and use it as the secure gateway between the internet and your internal network and it was free and open source. It’s functionality was otherwise only available from bespoke appliances costing from hundreds to thousands of pounds. When Dick parted company with smoothwall after making it a technical and financial success, it took a more commercial path and a fork of the open source version was created call IP-Cop.
Dick is not what I would call a people person, his impatience with the users his software created are almost legendary and he is hated by some on the net. However, he knows his subject well and is regarded highly in the internet security field, having headed the security team at NTL/Virgin amongst others, so his personal short-comings can be overlooked to some extent.
In a recent post, Dick highlighted a new modular approach to the Smoothwall-type solution known as Untangle. This is installed on a PC in the same way, although it requires a slightly higher spec, but it allows functionality to be installed as required in the form of application modules which appear as part of a software rack through a slick-looking GUI. The applications include spam blocking, web filtering, virus blocking, spyware blocking, firewall, VPN and more. Almost all of the functionality is open-source and they have a professional offering which includes improved remote access and customer support. They also provide pre-installed servers. All in all, this exciting project looks to compete with appliances from sonicwall, watchguard etc.
I’m going to try and find some time to check the project out and get a box running to see what it can do and where it’s at so far.
Today I received an interesting new take on the phishing scam which is designed to get you to enter personal information for credit card and identity theft. It takes the form of an email claiming to be from HM Revenue & Customs inviting you to visit a website and give details so that they can process a tax refund to you. The email is shown below:
The website is sends you to is correctly identified by Firefox as a forgery and asks for address and credit card details as you can see from the image below:
(not currently online)
Will this catch out people who don’t fall for the bank phishing scams?
Update: More research on this has shown this BBC article from December 2006 but as ever the scammers have improved the quality of the forgery and the email and website are now more convincing to the unexpecting eye. This scam has also seen quite a bit of activity in the states in the last 12 months. It looks like the UK can expect more of the same.
I had a requirement this week to purchase a new basic network printer from one of our shop-floor users since their old on died. I opted for an HP 2015N and it duly arrived. Today I had to install the thing and I have no idea what HP think they are playing at but the installation routine is a farce!
All I wanted to do was install the printer and assign it an IP address before I went down and installed it on the shop floor.
So, I put the CD in and the autorun brought up the first screen and immediately crashed, reporting a missing library file from an Office 12 directory on my system. What that has to do with their printer software I have no idea! Next I got to a screen giving me two options, one for a full install with all the tools, including the one to configure the network settings and the other for a minimal “drivers only” install. The size of these installs were 250MB and 150MB respectively! What can any printer possible do that requires a minimum install of 150MB?!!! I remember the good old days when a Star LC-10 colour dot matrix had a driver of about 20KB! Anyway, I needed to install the damn thing so I opted for the “big” install. It trundled away for a while and I saw the printer pop up as new hardware in the system tray. The software gave me an option for either a USB connection or a network connection. I opted for the network connection hoping it would scan and find the printer. No such luck, so I had to go back and plug the USB in and choose the USB option. The software wouldn’t find it even then so I tried printing a test page which came out straight away but still the software couldn’t find the printer.
Undeterred I thought I’d cancel and try installing the network config utility directly from the CD so I cancelled the installation. This removed all the files it had installed, including the printer drivers and insisted that I reboot the PC. After the restart, I tried installing the HP FX utility directly and the .msi package would not do anything so I was forced to re-run the original installation. When it still couldn’t find the printer (despite the fact that I could print to it!) I wondered if it didn’t like my USB hub so I connected it straight to a USB port and it worked!
Just to finish off my frustration, the damn software insisted on rebooting after installation!
I cannot get over the bloat and unnecessary crap which printer manufacturers are building into their printer drivers and it gets worse every year. How come the installation of our HP 2430N printers was a simple case of a 30 second driver install and this thing wanted 250MB of my hard drive? All a driver has to do is tell an operating system how to talk to it and there is no way that this task requires a “minimum” install of 150MB and certainly should not require a reboot of the system!
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