I’ve recently been testing a new broadband line speed checker called Isposure. The download is free and the speed tester is easy to install on Windows PCs.

It is unobtrusive while running and seems to provide accurate speed results for my ADSL connection. Isposure provides charts of your connection’s behaviour and the ability to compare it with other local providers, presumably based on collated speed statistics of other Isposure users.

This doesn’t suprise me particularly, as one of the authors of the software was a former colleague of mine, who was a particulary skilled developer.

If you’re interested in trying the product it can be downloaded from Isposure.com. When you are installing, you can use the promotional code “Luke Jagger”.

It is so good to see a simple, free broadband speed checker that does what it says and doesn’t try to sell you anything.

The dragon at Dragon Thoughts has taken a new flier under its wings today.

Helen Krasner, author and helicopter pilot instructor is a dragon’s friend and needed a little web space.

Helen has been given her own pages to write about her helicopter flying courses in Staffordshire and Derbyshire.

Helen is always interested in new students for helicopter flying.

The business side of Dragon Thoughts Ltd has always tried to be ethical, but what does it mean for a company to be ethical.

No military work

In the case of Dragon Thoughts, the ethics include not working for the military, or on projects that might assist any military organisation. Summed up as “we don’t kill people and we don’t help others to kill people“. This has led to turning down some potentially lucrative Ministry of Defence work in the past.

Small company policy

Other parts of the ethical stance have included charging smaller and similarly ethical companies such as “Vacuum Formers” and “Mr Pillow” lower fees.

Industrial Espionage

Dragon Thoughts has also turned down an industrial spying contract… but without the proof, I can’t write more on that subject.

White Hat

For security systems, such as internet banking, spam detection and anti-virus software, Dragon Thoughts has always worked to ensure the software is as difficult to break as possible, and as effective at ensuring data is kept private. This has also been the Dragon Thoughts approach to Search Engine Optimisation projects. In short, like the cowboy in an old Western film, Dragon Thoughts employees wear the White Hats, and don’t try to things that are wrong or may be deleterious to other ethical bodies.
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The newest edition of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is due to be released on the 17^th of June 2008.

It promises dramatic improvements in speed, performance and memory usage.

New features are set to include:

• Enhanced security
  • - even safer to use than before and even further ahead of Internet Explorer
  • Additional anti-virus integration
  • Integration with Windows Vista Parental controls
• Easier to Use
  • Full page zoom of text and graphics - This was a feature that distinguished Opera
  • Better Integration with Windows and Apple Macintosh
  • Resumable downloads - no need to restart a large download because of a glitch in your connection.

A customer of mine recently received the following spam…

Amazingly, considering that they promise worldwide search engine optimization, Dr. Marc Schneider and his company Global Vibration Inc., can only be found as being mentioned on sites relating to spamming.

I am Dr. Marc Schneider and I work for Global Vibration Inc. in Washington DC ( Tel: 1 202-787-3989 ) - I would like to speak with the person in charge of your international clientele. Who is my contact? Who should I speak to??

In fact, after visiting http://www.myclients.web.site.co.uk, I have noticed that your website cannot be found on foreign search engines (I tested it on Hispanic search engines, German search engines, Asian search engines, etc.) Our company is specialized in multilingual search engine promotions in 28 languages . From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, we can show you how to develop a true international online presence by promoting your website on foreign search engines.

Let us show you how to develop a presence on the multilingual web without having to translate your website: It is not necessary to translate your website in order to submit to foreign search engines, however, you need to have at least 1 page in Japanese optimized with Japanese keywords and meta tags in order to submit to Japanese search engines, at least 1 page in Spanish optimized with Spanish keywords in order to submit to Hispanic search engines and so on…

I strongly suggest that you watch our online presentation which will explains clearly how to get top rankings on foreign search engines with only 1 entry page per language (click on the following link or copy-paste it into your web browser): http://www.mplw.net/demo

From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, get users to find your website when searching with YOUR KEYWORDS in their Native language.

Please call me at 1 (202)-787-3989 or email me and let’s work on giving your website the true international exposure which it deserves to have with foreign native online users!!

Regards,

Marc Schneider, Ph.D.
Marcs@mplw.net
_____________________

GLOBAL VIBRATION INC.
1250 Connecticut Ave N.W. Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036 USA
TEL:1 (202)-787-3989 - FAX: 1 (202)-318-4779
http://www.mplw.net :
Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999.

They don’t seem to have a presence at all on Japanese google.

They claim to have been doing Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services (SEO) since 1999, but a whois query of their domain mplw.net shows a creation date of 04 Aug 2007 16:13:29

Many other companies are receiving the same spam for example, see http://www.tmcowners.com

For such a multi-nationally aware company, sending spam to the UK, Global Vibration Inc. haven’t even been capable of putting their own phone number in the standard international format, presumably because they are not aware that anyone outside the USA has to dial in international number to reach them.

Associated with their domains are the following administrative email addresses

• urls@mseo.com
• mauispirit@gmail.com

Wordpress have recently released a security update for their blogging software.

The security updates have been downloaded from http://wordpress.org/download/ and installed.

Wordpress makes the upgrades trivially easy, as long as you have direct ftp access to the server.

Having spent the last day and a bit re-installing software on my Dell Inspiron 530, I was disappointed to find that the “Send To” option in Microsoft Office 2007 was greying out “email recipient”, despite having a fully working Copy of Mozilla Thunderbird to communicate with.

I assume this is an error in the installation, rather than a protectionist measure by Microsoft, although it may be there to encourage people to install Microsoft Outlook, or use the Microsoft mail client that is built into Vista, as a replacement for Microsoft Outlook Express.

There is a fix, but it does require a registry edit that worked for me on Microsoft Windows Vista Premium. It will probably work on other versions of windows.

You should only attempt this if you are happy editing your windows registry with Regedit and understand that there are terrible consequences if you make some errors.

1. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Messaging Subsystem
   Locate the following registry values. Typically, these values are listed in the Windows Messaging Subsystem key.
   
Name Type Data
MAPI REG_SZ 1
CMC REG_SZ 1
CMCDLLNAME REG_SZ Mapi.dll
CMCDLLNAME32 REG_SZ Mapi32.dll
MAPIX REG_SZ 1
MAPIXVER REG_SZ 1.0.0.1
OLEMessaging REG_SZ 1

2. If any of these registry values are missing, follow these steps to add the values:
   1. Click the Windows Messaging Subsystem subkey, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click String Value.
   2. Type the name of the missing value, and then press ENTER.
   3. Click the new value, and then click Modify on the Edit menu.
   4. In the Edit String dialog box, type the correct value for the missing string value in the Value data box.
   5. Repeat steps a - d for each value that is missing from the table that is in step 1.
3. On the File menu, click Exit

Finally, when you restart your Micorsoft Office 2007 application, the “send” option on the file menu will include “Email” as a functional option and Microsoft Word or Excell will be happy to send documents as attachments using Mozilla Thunderbird, or some other Email client.

I learnt from my previous PC that apart from some software incompatibilities, Windows Vista does not support the majority of powered USB Hubs.

Fortunately for me, the Dell Inspiron that I have ordered has 8 USB ports, which means I probably won’t need a USB hub for all my devices.

I would hope that Microsoft could see its way to creating a patch for Vista which will allow all the XP compatible Powered USB hubs to work.

Apparently most unpowered USB 2.0 hubs do appear to work on Windows Vista, but that means it is essential to pick and choose which devices are connected through such a USB hub. Device that are self powered, such as printers and UPS’s will be fine, as will other very low power USB devices, but items that charge from a USB port, such as mobile phones and MP3 players, need to be connected directly to the PC.

I have just spent several hours trying to install my academic version of JBuilder 2005 on my new Quad core Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P PC, which came with Microsoft Windows Vista Premium pre-installed.

I have a legitimate license for JBuilder 2005 and no desire to purchase the most recent version of JBuilder

Somewhere during the installation process on Windows Vista, Borland’s JBuidler 2005 installer just hangs. I used Google to search for instructions or assistance with this problem, but found nothing. Even trying to get the executable installer to run in compatibility modes for older versions of windows failed - suggesting a failure in the design of Vista or implementation of its compatibility modes, even a year after its release.

Finally, I tried copying the complete hierarchy of my old installation of JBuilder from my old XP based computer to my new Vista based one. once I had done this I found the JBuilderW.exe file in the \Borland\JBuilder2005\bin\JBuilderw.exe and double clicked it to start.

JBuilder 2005 started quickly and asked for the Serial number and Authorisation key. Once those were provided, I was able to register my copy of JBuilder 2005 and it appear to be running beautifully on Windows Vista.

If this has been of help to you, then please let me know. If there are any corrections or additions that need to be made, please comment.

whilst cleaning up my hard drive, I found one reason that the Sony Ericsson PC Suite may have had for failing to install and to run slowly.

It created a 1.5 GB plain text log file in the temp directory. That volume of data must have taken a lot of resources by itself. It’s not surprising that the poorly built software could not install.

Apparently the Chinese government has made a decree that Buddhist monks in China need permission to reincarnate.
I’m unsure as to how they intend to regulate this in practice.

On 24^th September 2007, a W3C CSS working group created wiki to explain how CSS can or plans to accomplish each of the requirements in a Japanese layout Task Force document and to highlights areas where CSS does not handle the requirements.