You know I wrote not too long about about the doublemyspeed.com scam sounding radio ads. It really sounds like MyCleanPC.com is a scam in the sense that it promises a lot but doesn’t (or can’t) really deliver the miraculous results that they claim. Part of the idea is that they are a registry cleaner and claim that cleaning the registry will make your computer as good as new. For most people this really isn’t going to make an old slow pc into a brand new speed demon. From that aspect this is a scam. Over promising and under delivering.

Of course I’m not saying that registry cleaners are a bad thing. They can make a marginally noticeable difference. Although if your computer is dramatically slower now than it used to be there are really a lot of other reasons than registry cruft. Windows updates moving you up from Internet Explorer 6 all the way up to version 8 on a system that was marginally spec’d when it was purchased will probably make it slow today. 512MB memory for Windows XP is not enough today even though pre-SP2 is was probably okay for most uses.

You will not see as dramatic an improvement with registry scanning as with a proper memory upgrade (assuming you don’t already have enough memory.) The other concern with registry repair software is that if the registry is corrupted bad things can happen. If the registry is damaged yours system will not boot properly.

That much said there are some free utilities that can serve the same purpose that mycleanpc.com claims to do. I usually steer clear of programs that claim to solve your computer speed and stability problems because they typically never do. The best ways to increase system speed and stability are 1) remove unnecessary software, 2) check that all hardware is in proper working order (bad hard drive can cause slow system responsiveness) 3) upgrade memory if necessary.

Save your money to put towards a new machine if the three above still don’t make enough of a speed difference for you.

Sometimes you just can’t escape work. The other day on my way home an ad came on the radio for doublemyspeed.com It reminded me somewhat of the claims finallyfast.com (read my finallyfast.com removal). Anyway, I hadn’t heard of doublemyspeed so I thought I would check them out and see if it’s as much of a scam as it sounds. They suggest that you may not need to buy a new computer if yours is slow then proceed to give testimonials of people that installed their software and their pc ran so much faster than before.

Well, in stark contrast to the testimonials in their radio ad, the testimonials I’ve seen online accuse their software (Cyberdefender or Cyber Defender) of being adware, a rogue, next to impossible to remove from your system and a general pain in the ***. Yes, it seems that there are quite a few people with some choice words for doublemyspeed.com just as they were with ascentive and finallyfast.com (Surprise, surprise – installing a new software program is not all it takes to make your computer run fast…..)

The download on their web site currently is called Early Detection Center.

Here’s one complaint in particular that claims that the free version found lots of problems that needed to be fixed and refused to fix them until it was paid for. (Sounds like so many of the rogues we’ve seen.) Other software for them did not raise a red flag on the same issues. It pops up virus warning alerts encouraging you to buy and apparently did not uninstall via add/remove programs, kept pushing popus to purchase.

For close to 20 years now I’ve suggested that people avoid software that’s supposed to make their system faster or more stable unless it’s an operating system upgrade. I remember many legitimate products that claimed to improve system stability and speed that really were huge disappoinments and haven’t yet seen ONE that delivered on it’s promises. Some that I’ve seen have come from the more respected names in the industry but I have seen each and every one cause as much trouble as they fix. That’s not to mention the products that are more than likely scams.

If you have spyware or viruses or other malware on your machine removing that will improve the speed of your pc. Adding memory will likely improve your pc speed, uninstalling unnecessary programs or replacing heavyweight software with lighter weight applications will speed up your pc. It’s VERY unlikely that you can find any product that you can install that will magically double your comptuers speed. (Unless you replace Vista with XP or Linux….)

I’m filing this in the rogue security software category since they seem to have made it so difficult to remove.

There’s a rumor going around and a lot of unconfirmed information that a facebook application known as fan check is actually a virus. I’m seeing several claims that if someone becomes a fan of this facebook app (which the page claims is undergoing changes and currently unavailable)… well if someone becomes a fan in the meantime their friends will all be notified of the app, password on the account changed, etc. I’m a bit skeptical at this point because EVERYTHING I see seems 3rd party and I don’t see anyone claiming that THEIR account was compromised. What I DO know is that some of the top search results are known malware attack sites. For instance the second result (which was the top result a few hours ago….

Is eaves.ca/cgi/facebook-fan-check-virus.htm and the page it redirects to pushes the Personal Antivirus download. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Personal Antivirus but it’s one of those rogue antivirus applications that tries to push you into downloading and then buying with all sorts of trumped up virus and problem claims.

So, I don’t know if the fan check virus is legit or not, what I do know is that you need to be cautious with the search results. If you get something pop up offering to scan your pc for viruses close the browser window. Don’t download the scareware that they’re pushing and for heavens sake don’t pay a cent to the companies that push these scare and other slimy tactics.

Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)

Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….

I may spend some time in the coming weeks here giving a peek behind the curtain at some of the scripts I’ve written for that site, or for some of those that I use myself to generate a morse code mp3 from an rss feed for instance. I’m a bit reluctant to get the code of the generator script out there though for concern that I haven’t dotted all the i’s so to speak.

I have noticed in the last few weeks that java updates on windows now clean up old versions of the java runtime. (At LAST.) Java traditionally left it’s old counterparts installed making you go through and manually remove the older version. Why remove the older version you ask? Well, the java runtime engine version can be specified by java code. The default is the most recent, but if someone wanted to do something mischievous, and take advantage of a vulnerability in an older release they could specify that release and if it was installed, then it doesn’t really matter that you’ve updated.

I did notice that it failed to remove something as old as, I think, update 5 of the latest version of the java runtime engine. (Current AFAIK is update 13.) So, it would be worth a check in your control panel/add remove programs to clean out the oldest ones and then in the future it should tidy up on it’s own. (THANK YOU SUN!)

I’ve got ideas for several fairly large pages here – collections of ideas in one place. For quite some time I was pretty fond of the blog post style of entries and for many things that makes sense, but…. there is also a place for collecting lot’s of information on a single topic on a single page so that you’re less likely to “lose anything…” Sometimes I feel like the blog posts are somewhat like a large and jumbled junk drawer and the pages are neat organized boxes with labels telling exactly what is inside.

I should also mention that this site will likely be on the move soon. My webhost provider is in the midst of transitioning away from their current vps model and it sounds as though things will be heading towards more of a shared hosting style setup. This (and many of my other sites) have become complex enough in their demands that I’m thinking I’ll be moving many to a Xen vps hosted environment. I’ve used the morse code ring tones site as a first experiment of my own hosting in that xen environment and among other things I’m blown away by the responsiveness. It will (hopefully) mean a performance boost if things work out right. I haven’t finalized plans yet, but I think that’s the direction I’ll be heading. It looks as though it’s going to be a cost increase for me though as much as 50% more for my overall hosting, so…. I’ll be looking for an overall improvement in speed/responsiveness if that’s the case to at least make it worth spending more.

It seems as though there are a few other notes I was going to write here, but at the moment I can’t recall what they would be….

I’ve been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad’s computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spend much time on it. Unfortunately problems like this are usually the ones that take the most time to solve because they seem random and it’s hard to pin down the cause.) He runs Windows XP primarily (although we have an ubuntu install setup as a dual boot choice.) In the last year the power supply and video card have been replaced for similar behavior. Although it’s been several months since the replacement with little “misbehaving” since. One of the things I did was run a memory test, which came out fine.

The hard drive also tests fine. So, I tried a stress test of the cpu, cpuburn.

The system died and it took several minutes before it would restart. It sounds like an overheating issue.

I installed speedfan under windows so I could see the reported CPU temperature and sure enough when it came back up it was in the 50-55 degree celsius range. After testing a few online videos and observing the temperature (and a few online searches for the expected temperature range and auto-cut off levels) it appeared that it would shut down at around 57 degrees celsius (maybe 56) and then refuse to reboot until it had cooled well below the threshold.

So, we ordered a new cooling fan. Unfortunately it didn’t do much better than the initial fan. The temperature still hovered in that borderline high range of 53-55 degrees celsius. So, I looked in the bios to see if there was any way to adjust the auto cutoff. (At this point in time it was annoyingly frequent.) No way to adjust (bios on this by the way is identified as F15 revision (for the long string of GA – 7VT600 F15 that shows on system boot…. the revision date is 8/16/2004-kt600-8235……etc.etc. The processor is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Socket A)

SO…. new cooling fan not being productive, no bios updates to allow us to tinker with the threshold temperature for cutoff… so I did the smarter thing which was add a second fan to the case. This fan was placed to blow air out of the back of the case from just behind the cpu heat sink. Since that fan has been installed I think the highest temperature I’ve seen registered was 51 degrees celsius (under heavy load – 10 minutes of an online flash video running fullscreen.) Most of the time it settles in the mid 40’s celsius.

My hope is that has at least bought us a few more months of use out of the system.

Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windows (although I primarily run linux on my machines.) I get to do a fair amount of server level work with linux variants, but this one, being a desktop install, intrigued me.

The issue was that the buttons on the trackpad didn’t work. She also indicated that she had tried a usb mouse and those buttons didn’t work either. As I looked at it, I had already spent some time browsing through bug reports getting ideas on what might be the issue. It behaved exactly as she described and so then the real fun began.

I looked at the xorg.conf file from /etc/X11/ – it looked normal (it was the default config file) I first tried doing some edits to clearly specify the trackpad device (cursor movement with the trackpad had been working though, it was just the clicks that weren’t registering.

So, after making changes I restarted gdm (the greeter) ( /etc/init.d/gdm restart ) and gave a try. Some things started working, tapping the trackpad substituted for the left click and the right click work. The external mouse worked with both buttons.

So, I chipped away a bit more. I verified that the files existed for some of the appropriate packages, some I reinstalled. I uninstalled compiz (having read a bug report related to that) I reverted to an older version of xinput-synaptic and came back to current. I tried mapping the mouse buttons with an .xmodmap file.

Nothing productive.

One thing that I did notice was that the right trackpad or both mouse buttons would work only when I had restarted gdm, not on a freshboot. So, I started looking at the boot process and the output in /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see if there was anything significantly different being reported there. Nothing useful.

I disabled the “dontzap” feature that’s new in jaunty. If you read the release notes they have disabled the ability to “kill off” the graphical interface with ctl-alt-backspace… I essentially re-enabled that option so it’s quickly and easily possible to restart the gui.

The bottom line of what I found was this. If you’re moving the mouse (trackpad) when gdm first starts, the mouse buttons will be usable (with the exception of the left button on the trackpad (!)) If you don’t move the mouse at the startup of gdm it get’s “stuck” in pointer mode… I can bring the cursor down over the “options” menu in the lower left corner of the greeter screen and it still holds it’s i-beam icon as though you are editing a text window, the options does not highlight on the mouseover and no right/left click/tapping will work until gdm is blown away and restarts with a ctl-alt-backspace.

After that everything works with the exception of the left trackpad button (although you can tap.) I tried reversing the buttons and it’s still the one on the left that doesn’t function.

Wondering if I was missing something I tried an experiment. I (using another computer) installed Jaunty 9.04 to a USB hard drive and brought it up to date with all the current updates. I booted this usb hard drive on three or four systems and it worked marvelously (hardware detection “just worked” on each machine.) The only one to exhibit any problems was this Acer Aspire One ZG5. Guess what the problems were? well…. if I didn’t move the mouse when the greeter screen first came up I wasn’t able to do any mouse clicking (the pointer seemed frozen in the i-beam cursor icon mode) and even if I did (or restarted gdm) the left button did not work.

I came to the conclusion that there were two different issues, one I suspected may be a software issue and an update could fix it (the initial boot problem with useless buttons.) The second problem (left click not working) could just be a hardware issue – since it only affects the trackpad and not an external mouse. As I think about it, I do wonder if the trackpad were faulty (left button) could it cause the other problem when it’s first initialized (?)

If I knew I would have access to the machine again I might have filed a bug report with Ubuntu to see if they could get someone to verify this as software issue (or not). SInce I won’t have access to it, I wouldn’t be able to follow up with more information if they needed it, so instead of a bug report I’m posting here.

The only way to know for sure if it’s Ubuntu 9.04 or the netbook is to have an identical model to test, which I don’t.

So, does anyone out there have the same IDENTICAL model netbook – with jaunty 9.04 – are you seeing a similar problem or does it work just fine? The updates on this machine were current as of June 1, 2009.

Comments are open in case anyone has some input on the issue.

First off, you should now that I like to study languages. I have studied Spanish for a good amount of time (and have a site related to learning spanish for beginners). I’ve also studied French and German and a smattering of other languages. In fact, you might even say that my interest in shortwave radio comes from that same fascination with other languages. Anyway, I have a good number of dvds that I’ve used to help in language learning. Since DVD’s support multiple subtitle and language tracks they can be a great way to practice either your (light) reading or listening skills in a language you’re studying. However, up until now I didn’t know of a video file type that supported multiple audio tracks on the pc. I can’t say that I looked too hard, but….

The last week or so, I’ve been playing with handbrake which is a cross platform video converter. It can be used to convert Video from a dvd into a file on your hard drive, or simply move video from one format to another. The default settings for handbrake seem to be very good. (The picture I’ve seen from the default encoding is fantastic.) I’ve been compiling a collection of files to load on the laptop to take with us on an upcoming road trip. We have a 7 year old and 1 year old and (especially for the 1 year old) the 5 or 6 hour drive is looking …. challenging. So, I wanted to get a few videos together to take with us without taking a stack of videos.

So, the defaults for handbrake is to output the video in an mp4 container format, which I hadn’t made use of before, but it appears that mp4 can support multiple audio streams. As I looked into it I found how easy it was to add to your ripping project the extra audio tracks. (On the tab for audio, just click the plus sign and then select the languages in the list below. I assume the first in the list will be the default audio when you playback the file.)

My rip of a scooby doo disc finished overnight and I tested this morning with vlc as my video player. In the Audio menu you can choose the audio track. They are even labeled correctly. Up until now, I have had separate dvd rips for titles that I wanted to watch in either language (waste of space.) Now, it should be possible for me to consolidate those. FANTASTIC!

Yes, I really enjoy trying to learn languages – I’ve even got a squidoo lens about learning new languages. For that matter I’ve even compiled a listing of places you can watch spanish television online. One of the nice things about having the discs available on the computer (or even the live streams) is that you can watch in your chosen language any time. (Now if only region encoding weren’t the obstacle to dvd-language studies that it is.)

This is a bit of a tangent, but I do wish that the production studios would realize the market that their catalog of shows/movies with foreign dubs could have if distributed domestically for language learning. I know most traditional language teachers would frown on this suggesting that you first seek out movies that were originally produced in the target language you’re studying. However, my argument is this: familiarity. For instance, there are movies that I have seen so many times in English that I know every word. Picking up new vocabulary via something that’s already somewhat familiar with in my native language should be relatively easy.

By contrast if I pick up a movie I’ve never heard of, in my target language the challenge is much greater. This doesn’t mean that I’m snubbing the culture of the target language, it just means that I’m not ready to cross that threshold yet. As I’ve studied Spanish I can’t tell you how many hollywood movies I’ve watched with the Spanish language dubbing and really never got into the original Mexican movies, but as my Spanish is better and I’m actually able to understand more, I find myself getting sucked into some of the late night “golden age” of Mexican cinema films.

I had a machine that I picked up to test internet connectivity. They were able to do email, but not visit web pages. My first thought was that internet explorer may have been a bit sideways, but when I got it to the workbench I figured I had solved the problem. No ethernet port. They’ve been using USB then to connect to their DSL modem. So, I plugged in a network card and tested and everything worked fine and scheduled the redelivery. But, when I got it onsite things didn’t quite work out as smoothly. Here’s the setup. A DSL modem with built in switch had a laptop hooked up via ethernet (with absolutely NO connectivity problems) and this desktop which was hooked up first via USB and now via ethernet.

What was really peculiar is SOME websites came up, others didn’t. Mozilla.com came up, google.com came up, crucial.com mostly came up (page content loaded with one or two items missing.) MSN.com wouldn’t come up. bankofamerica.com, dell.com were missing in action too. They would act like they were going to load and then take minutes trying.

I checked firewalls, disabled the entire security suite. That made no difference. I checked DNS settings – no difference. I tuned the system for performance as best I could. No difference. I went through all the settings related to internet explorer and reset to defaults, no good.

It just didn’t make sense, they were going through the same router yet one was clearly not working the other was. The one that was not working had worked fine on another network. So, I switched the network cables, no joy. Finally, not knowing what else to try (and not having the password for the dsl router/modem) I decided to just unplug the dsl router/modem and let it reset.

Uhm…

Right.

Everything perked up and started working.

The SCREWIEST DSL modem situation i think I’ve seen.

Two pc’s hooked up to the same router, the same way and one could pull up every single site mentioned above with no problems, the other could just pull up some of them and rebooting the router fixed it. I’m wondering if there may have been some sort of ip address that the pc had maintained through the usb/ethernet cable switch over, but I really have no CLUE why that would be an issue.

Actiontec is the brand name on the modem btw. Actiontec GT704AWG

For quite some time I’ve been making use of a dd-wrt modified linksys box on my home network as an openvpn endpoint so that when I’m out and about in the world, I connect the vpn, switch firefox to route through a squid proxy server on the home network and I’ve got a nice fairly secure web browsing setup. But, as they say there’s more than one way to skin a cat. And, that’s what I’ve played around with the last couple days. First off, I guess I should describe the concept. 1) Let’s say that you’re browsing the web at an open wireless access point and you don’t trust the network or 2) let’s say you need to be able to access an intranet web server that is not accessible from the internet side of a network or scenario 3) let’s say a web site is blocking access based on ip address (for instance say you’re behind the great firewall of xyz business/company)…. how can you still manage to access the web pages you want to 3,2) at all or 1) securely with as little snooping as possible.

All in all, this will make it possible to look as though you’re browsing the web from a different location than you really are and is also one way how to get around blocked websites. Now, it’s up to you to accept the responsibility for your actions if you use this to get around blocked sites

There are several ways you can do this. The first IS via openvpn and a web proxy like squid, but that’s a fair amount of setup for you on your home network to maintain browsing from outside – besides what if you’re home connection is down and you want a quick plan b?

Here’s one approach….

SSH – secure shell to the rescue…. from a console window make a secure connection to a secure shell server you have access to, with dynamic port forwarding enabled.

ssh -D 1080 username@hostyoucanaccess.com

go ahead and authenticate and then in your firefox settings, instruct firefox to browse through a SOCKS 5 server at localhost port 1080. (frankly, you could probably pick any higher port number if you like.)

(BTW if you want to get fancier with ssh you can pass any of the following:
-q :- be quiet – don’t output more information than necessary.
-T :- Do not allocate a pseudo tty – i.e. no login shell.
-f :- move the ssh process to background, as we don’t want to interact with this ssh session directly.
-N :- Do not execute remote command.
-n :- redirect standard input to /dev/null.

In addition on a slow line you can gain performance by enabling compression with the -C option.
)

I like to pull up my ip check page to verify which public internet address I’m browsing from. SO, now it’s as if you’re browsing the internet from your ssh server machine.

Now, if you needed to access an intranet page within the network that your secure shell server is hosted, you should be able to. It should behave actually just as though you were on the destination lan for everything within the web browser. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could probably set it as a system wide proxy and not have to manually configure your applications to tunnel through it.

It should be noted that your web traffic will only be encrypted between you and the remote ssh server. After that it leaves the pipe and will only be encrypted if you’re visiting encrypted sites.

Now, for reasons of very restrictive firewalls it might be nice if you knew of a ssh server listening on port 443 so that it would bypass even the most draconian restrictions. (BTW, that’s how I’ve previously setup openvpn connections – ports 53 udp or 80/443 tcp are good candidates – 53 udp because it’s dns and shouldn’t be blocked if they expect domain lookups to work, however… it’s typically unencrypted and might look suspicious – besides they may do internal dns so it’s not my first choice. Port 80 is a good candidate because if they allow outside world web access then you should be able to pass data, still port 80 is typically unencrypted and it might look a bit suspect. My preference then is port 443. It’s necessary for https: sites and is expected to be encrypted, so it makes a nice openvpn (or ssh) alternate port.

It’s also possible to tunnel your web traffic through something called tor to enhance your privacy on the internet and essentially make it appear as though you’re browsing the web from a location where you aren’t physically. So, if a forum is only allowing connections from ip address in Poland and you really want to connect you can configure tor to only use endpoints that are in Poland and all your web browsing bits will ping pong through several machines in an encrypted tunnel until they exit a machine in Poland and connect to the forum your trying to connect to. To use tor, you need to also install a proxy server like privoxy.

By the way, tor can be a slow network – they are typically fairly oversaturated, but there are some ways to get a faster link going by tweaking your torrc file. I should point out that it’s somewhat abusive of the tor network resources to try to suck down giant bittorrents through tor….

I should also mention that there is a great firefox plugin for managing your proxy settings. (It got to be a pain manually switching them, so you might look at foxyproxy. It let’s you configure multiple proxys and switch between them for all traffic, OR more interestingly using text matching it could allow you to use a proxy only for certain sites.

Also – Set your proxy server to resolve DNS requests instead of your computer; in Firefox’s about:config area, set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = true.

(From what I see that is the default – either that or I’ve already been there and done that.)

Other links that may be interesting are :a site to check if you are using tor and an ip locator.

And if you’re command-line phobic on linux you might take a look at gnomes ssh tunnel manager (GSTM I think in packages.) Really whether you are comfortable at the command line or not, this looks like a neat, quick interface.

This is a good time of year to think about cleaning out your old electronic (junk) equipment and make room for the new. Now, I’ve had a tendency to hang onto legacy hardware longer than I should. (I’m sure I could dig up a working 5 1/4″ drive somewhere and probably a motherboard that would support it.) So, I thought I’d open this up and ask – what’s the oldest (working) computer hardware you still have?