Disclaimer:  I’m fairly certain this won’t prevent you from being infected if a naughty little java process successfully runs on your computer, all this will do is prevent the exploited file from being saved to your computer, (and saves a tiny bit of disk space in the process.)

Here’s how you prevent Java from saving temporary files to your computer, trust me, you don’t need them!

Step One: Launch Java Control Panel

Open your computer’s Control panel and double-click the Java Icon:

you may have to switch to “classic view” on XP to find it quickly, on Windows Vista and 7, you should be able to click the start orb and simply type “Java” to find an icon to launch the Java control panel.

Step Two: click the Settings Button for “Temporary Internet files”

Look for this button to open the dialog box for temporary files settings:

 Step Three: Disable and delete existing temporary files:

Clear the checkbox labeled “Keep temporary files on my computer,” then click the “Delete Files” button.

Then, just click ok buttons until the java control panel goes away and you’re done.

Java files will no longer be stored locally on your computer, which is a good thing in my opinion.

Recently, I have had the opportunity to experience first-hand, the process of setting up and hosting on GoDaddy, and was prompted to create this article comparing the two.

1&1, The Good:

1&1, as I said, is a better value for the money.  The basic “starter” web hosting package includes a domain name, 250 2GB email boxes, 10 1GB MySQL5 databases, secure ftp access, 50GB of hosting space and unlimited transfer volume.  1&1 hosting also supports SSH and many application scripts such as PHP5, Pearl, Python, and Ruby.

The dashboard or hosting management interface is concise and allows you to manage all aspects of your package in one place.  Setting up new databases or email accounts is a snap, and the hosting overall is very flexible.

Your shared hosting is also stored redundantly at two geographically separate data centers, so the failover is nice.  My website has never really gone down for longer than a few minutes, or without prior notification from the web host.

For those who aren’t the most web savvy, there is a website builder interface that allows you to use a WYSIWYG “Website Builder” to set up and design your website.  Using this feature does not bastardize the features of the package like with GoDaddy, which I am about to talk about shortly.

1&1, The Bad:

I consider 1&1 more of a “self-service” kind of company, because the customer service is not so good.  It is rare that I actually need support, but whenever I do, it usually takes a day or two to accomplish what I need from the support staff.  Those more patient than I, may have more success with emailing for support than trying to get them on the phone.  They also use some German company for the domain registrations, which in itself probably isn’t that big a deal, but I’ve seen it become a hassle trying to transfer domains out of 1&1 once the accounts are already closed.

There have also been reports I’ve read online that indicate that 1&1 will cancel your hosting if your shared hosting takes more than a lion’s share of the system resources on the computer housing your hosting package.  I don’t know if they still do this, because most of these reports are from a few years ago, but if your website becomes “facebook” or “twitter” popular, you should probably put it on a dedicated server anyway, if for nothing else, for performance/availability reasons.

I also tried using the “click and build” feature once and it plainly didn’t work.  That being said, that is probably why I can’t even find it in my dashboard anymore.  Maybe it will be back one day soon.

Go Daddy, the Good:

Pretty girls in the commercials, and the customer service may be slightly better than that of 1&1.  Also, the “click and build” installation of commonly used platforms such as WordPress or Joomla, seems to be a little more efficient than building on 1&1.  Not as many options as 1&1 alleges to offer, but for now, it works, and usually is up an running within a couple hours.

GoDaddy’s web based email interface seems to be very user friendly also.

The Domain manager is extremely powerful, with many options for creating subdomains, and managing CNAME or A records.

Go Daddy, The Bad:

Go Daddy’s account manager is confusing at best.  All aspects of the hosting seem to be managed from separate pages and interfaces.  The domain manager is separate from the hosting manager, which is separate from the email account manager, and so on.  Furthermore, everything wants to open in a new window or tab.  Getting around in your hosting package is fairly obnoxious.

I also found myself frustrated that you cannot point the destination of your domain name to any folder other than your hosting root without an “ugly hack.”  I think linux hosting should allow for private folders outside of the site root for protecting files that certain applications may need access to.

Go Daddy “nickel and dimes” for everything.  They give you a tiny number of email addresses, and are ready to sell you more.  Everything about Go Daddy in fact, seems about giving you less for your money, but allowing you to upgrade to add more.

The package supports SSH, but the setup is obnoxious, and I didn’t find a way to connect to the space to upload files securely, only FTP.

Final Thoughts

So which is better?  I certainly would be lying if I said I didn’t have a preference for 1&1 between the two.  Go Daddy really does give less for the money, and the interface is terrible.  1&1 can be troublesome when dealing with the customer service, but way more flexible, and the site root problem on Go Daddy is a deal breaker for me.  Hopefully you can take the information I have presented here and make our own call as far as which is best for your needs.

Links

1&1 Internet
Go Daddy

Now I understand Nintendo’s position on it being a gaming console, and sticking to their guns on marketing it as strictly that.  But with Sony’s new “Move” controller campaign, and the Xbox Kinect around the corner, the Wii stands to lose their edge when it comes to how we interact with our video games.  It doesn’t matter if Nintendo still has the BEST motion controller, the competition moving into the motion controller game is going to cause serious problems with Nintendo’s market share.

This isn’t because the Wii isn’t a good gaming console, don’t get me wrong.  This is because we can’t do anything else with our Wii systems but play games.  Once upon a time, if you had a copy of twilight princess, an SD card, an internet connection, and nerves of steel (if you had to scrape up cash to buy your console), you could hack your console to install homebrew channels.  Once you successfully installed homebrew channels, you could then install a DVD player app on the machine.  I, for the life of me, don’t understand why Nintendo hasn’t put a legitimate DVD player channel in the Wii Shop Channel in the past 4 years.

To add to that, why hasn’t Nintendo done more to make their channels more app friendly?  Why can’t my Wii have a Facebook or Twitter channel?  Why does my Netflix require a disk to stream movies from the internet, instead of just accessing that with a channel?  Why can’t YouTubeXL be an app?  My console has USB ports, why can we not use a skype app?

This is not to pick on the Wii, because as I said, my wife and I, we love our Wii.  I just wish the thing would get with the times as we are about to enter the next decade.

UPDATE: Just over a week after I posted this, I got an email from netflix:



Yay, Netflix!  Maybe this is a good indicator of things to come

If ever there was anything more complicated and convoluted as it relates to computer stuff, it’s microsoft windows licensing.  There are several different types of licenses for windows but the most common from a consumer standpoint is the OEM license.  *OEM stands for “Original Equipment Manufacturer.” If you’ve just purchased a new computer that came preloaded with any product from Microsoft, chances are, there’s a Certificate of Authenticity on the bottom, (referred to by Microsoft as a COA.)  This badge on the bottom of the machine is basically your license to use your operating system on that machine, and theoretically, the license is permanently bound to that system.  This license key can come in handy if, say you wanted to reinstall the operating system on your computer.  There are, however, some little known facts that most buyers at large would never know about, so here’s your free info.

For one, newer COA stickers for Vista or Windows 7 have some seriously poor quality ink, that within a few months of use, can wear and make your product key completely illegible, which in turn, makes it impossible to reinstall your OS with a standard OEM disk.  *Please note, you cannot use your OEM COA key to reinstall using a retail disk.

To protect yourself from this problem down the line, one of the first things you should do with new laptops after you unpack them from the box is flip them over, and apply some clear tape or a clear label over the Product Key sticker.  This will prevent the printing on the label from wearing off.

You should also make sure that you never share this key publicly.  (It sounds kinda crazy, but people have taken photos of their machines and put on ebay when trying to sell them.)  Your product key, is unique to your machine, but only after you have used it, so if someone is given the opportunity to use it before you, it becomes bound to their machine instead.  The reason for this is because over at “X-Computers” where they manufacture thousands of laptops, they stick the COA on your machine, but then use a “Volume License” key when they install on your machine.  What this means, is the product key that was actually used to install your preload build, is not the same as the one on your COA sticker.  What this means is, even though there are programs for recovering your key, If you don’t protect your sticker, there is no software means available to recover the key from your sticker.

So bottom line:

1. if you buy a new computer, either record and file your product key from your COA sticker, and/or protect it with some kind of clear protective cover like clear tape or a clear label.
2. Don’t share the key with the public at large because it’s likely someone can steal it.
3. If possible, skip the problem entirely by making your own orig factory image and a regularly scheduled backup image.  (I will post a blog about this at a later date.

Sidenote: Sys recovery can be an ugly process, so again, only use it as a last resort as a means of repairing a machine.  I only use it if I have a hard drive that mechanically does not operate.  in most other cases, computer problems can just be repaired.  You can always call The Computer Caretaker if you have questions!

Net Nanny

One of the most comprehensive parental control suites I have seen is Net Nanny.  Just a penny shy of $50, it’s definitely not the cheapest web content filtering solution, but it is by far one of the most effective.  It boasts a  very robust feature set which includes filtering of Web sites, peer to peer networks, messengers, social networking, or even video games.  It also is a stand out as far as I’m concerned because of it’s ability to create individual user profiles.  So if you have a 6 year old and a 16 year old that both use the same computer, you can set them up with different levels of content filtering and automatically attach it to their Windows or Mac user profile.  You can even schedule blocks of time when each user is allowed to use the internet.

K9 Web Protection

If you’re on a tight budget, and can’t afford the price tag on Net Nanny, there is a free alternative you can use as well.  Although it’s not as feature rich, K9 Web Protection from Blue Coat Systems is a great way to make sure your kids don’t access websites with inappropriate content on them.  Best of all, K9 is completely free, (requires registration.)  K9, however, does not offer the user segmentation that Net Nanny does.  Protection settings are system-wide, and if you want to browse restricted content, you have to provide the admin password to unblock content for a certain time period.  K9 will let you decide what categories of websites and content to allow users on your computer to see.

I’ve said this before to clients, and I will continue to say it now.  If your machine doesn’t boot, Geek Squad techs are incapable of diagnosing the trouble. The Geeks at best buy told my client that her hard drive was likely damaged, and that it would have to be replaced.  Following that, they gave her a total estimate to swap the drive with a fresh new one, reinstall her operating system, and maybe back-up her data from the old drive (which doesn’t make sense if it doesn’t work.)  All this for somewhere in the realm of $300-$400.  Meanwhile installing a fresh hard drive with a fresh OS install would have fixed her problem for probably about 10 minutes.  Ultimately, she would have been out 300 bucks or more and still had a problem with her  machine.

I looked at the machine, saw the disk 0 error, found that it was due to erroneous system settings in BIOS.  Then loaded the Vista recovery console, and saw that the C drive was indeed accessible and I could view all the files there. However, the system failed to boot.  As it turns out, I was able to trace the problem to a couple of bad, (and very cheap, mind you) memory modules.  Replace the modules, and Boom, system works again.  Client didn’t have to lose any data, and she didn’t have to pay for useless re-installation of her operating system.  Then again, go to FAIL repair shops, get FAIL results!

I use my laptop with some DJ software called M-Audio Torq, which is a program that actively streams two audio files at the same time to an audio interface connected to my computer via USB.  This requires some pretty significant resources of the computer and the operating system.  Without getting into a bunch of technical details about it, let’s just say, everything has to be working well for the software to accomplish this.  So, the last few I used the software, I started getting some unexplained audio dropouts, (basically imagine the sound cutting in and out.)

Trying to narrow down the problem, I looked at the CPU in the task manager, the memory, disk fragmentation, and all kinds of stuff, but couldn’t figure out the source of the problem.  Finally, I downloaded HWMonitor from CPUID.com, and found the source of my problem.  Heat!

My dropouts started occuring because my CPU started reaching  100 degrees Celsius.  The computer is not soo stupid, when the processor starts getting too hot, the system reduces the processors clock rate in order to protect it from overheating damage.  Under normal circumstances, it would just be a case where, as the computer got older, it would just seem to not be as snappy as it once was.  Most probably wouldn’t even notice enough to care.  For me, however, the dropouts could make me look like a total idiot in public since I have gigs lined up where dropouts would be a show stopper.

So what did I do?  Well, what any smart computer technician would do.  I decided to try to improve the cooling.  So early this afternoon I began the arduous task of disassembling my computer with the intent to upgrade the thermal paste between the my CPU and heatsink.  instead, I found the cause of the problem was at the fan.  See pictures below.

So in my computer, there’s a heat pipe, which has a heat sink full of metal fins, which this pictured fan blows air across, to keep the processor cool.  There was so much dust, lint, and probably pet fur, (I have 4 cats,) in the fan that it was literally plugged.  Once I took it out, and put my computer back together, my AMD processor never went above 75 degrees under heavy load.  Bye bye audio dropouts!  Hello performance!  I probably just added about 1½-2 years of life to my computer by doing this.  I strongly recommend that you do NOT attempt this type of service yourself if your computer is under warranty still, or if you aren’t expert at computer service and repair.

Why do I consider it overpriced?  because of Apple’s shortsighted ability to NOT put things in it that I as a typical user would seriously want.  First being, multitask.  I personally think it’s absurd that a portable tablet can run sooooo many apps from the app store, (it fully supports any iPhone/iPod touch app,) but for some retarded reason, it can’t run two at the same time!  That means no writing notes or playing games while Pandora or your music player runs in the background.  I can’t imagine how I would ever be happy with this restriction.

Even more ridiculous though, is the side effect of Apple’s persistent resistance to Adobe flash.  Yeah you can put a great web browser (debatable) on the iPad, but with no flash support, that means no flash video support, (sorry hulu,) no support for those facebook games that everyone seems hooked on, (i.e. cafe world, farmville, yoville, etc.), or no player of any type that doesn’t have a native iPhone app.  I guess they would rather you spend up all your money on their app store apps, which is cool and all, but not after just shelling out $499 on this thing.

I would have liked this thing if it weren’t for these two major shortcomings, but for now my verdict, iPad?  No thank you!

The one thing about these netbooks that annoys me quite a bit, is that a lot of them have the exact same features and specs as they had over a year ago!  Let me guess, Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD?  Just look at the display models, and that’s pretty much all you’ll see.  Well, today actually, I did happen to see some atom n450 processors out there too, but I still find the so-called “variety” uncompelling.

Now there is  a benefit to the Atom N450 CPUs, battery life.  The N450 chips are part of intel’s new pinetrail platform, which does away with the “northbridge” on the system board, (if my understanding correctly,) and integrates a GPU and memory controller directly on the processor die.  I hear this doesn’t necessarily equal much of a boost in performance, but it does reduce power consumption by 20 percent.  Other higher performing chips in the pinetrail lineup include the D410 and D510, but I doubt you’ll be seeing those in netbooks.

So what do you do if you want high performance?  Want to watch HD videos at an actually smooth frame rate?  The secret, apparently, is to pair atom with the Nvidia ION chipset.  The Atom/Ion combo apparently benchmarks much faster in performance tests than the Atom on the Intel only platforms.  The hard part though?  I have never walked into a retail store and actually seen any ION notebooks on display.

The HP mini 311 is one of the early adopters of the ION platform, and best buy does carry it, but online only.  There’s a couple of other models that look pretty nice that you can check out a comparitive review at engadget.

To make the long story short.  Make sure you shop around when looking at netbooks, and pay special attention to the shelf age of the machine.  I have a feeling that retailers are hoarding the newest stuff in the back to try to get rid of the older aging models.  If you see a n270 or n280 and it’s not an ion based machine, it’s old tech, and probably overpriced.  N450 isn’t bad if you want current, but not recommended if you need performance.  Ion kicks butt, but is a little more premium in the price.  The real lesson I wanted to convey though, don’t buy that old stuff!