Weekend show and osx

We have the Weekend show summary up on the website. We didn't get to cover safe shopping online, but we did have a chat about Leopard and covered a good range of questions.

Epson printer blues

Mike Arrington at Telecrunch has an entertaining article on how Epson's new website sucks. He sums it up, "The last time I bought one of your printers the software screwed it up so badly I had to reformat the hard drive just to get it to work again. Since then, I’ve stuck with HP’s.

Fire the consultants, stop trying to be a conversational marketer and just get back to the basics."

He's quite right, Epson's printer software has been dreadful since the days of Windows 3.1 and it hasn't got better. In fact, they persisted with the horrid Epson Printer Manager well into the Windows 98 days.

The sad thing is the printers themselves aren't bad units, it's just that you have to install a pile of rubbish on your computer to make the things work.

If Epson were to get back to the basics, then they should ditch the software writers.

Confusing wirelesses

One of the common questions I get from customers and on the radio shows are from people who are confused about the different types of wireless technologies.

On the last Nightlife spot Tony fell for this and yesterday's Gadget Guy newsletter does as well. It surprises me with Gadget Guy as this stuff is Peter Blasina's bread and butter.

Here's the basic differences;

Wireless Internet is a way of connecting to the Internet by using the mobile phone network or other wire free technologies. All of these have built in security that makes it almost impossible to evesdrop.

Wireless Networks are a way of sharing files, printers and Internet connections in your home or office. These have major problems with security as many systems come without the basic security set up and most people don't understand how to do it.

There's a bit more to it and I'm posting it as our problem of the week on our website tonight.

User responsibility

One of the reasons we re-write PCs for Dummies for Australian users is the risk of people trying to get around the standard, US based settings. A story in the SMH tech section has a good example of this.

What does bug me with this story is the underlying assumption is that the software company, Microsoft, the laptop manufacturer, Toshiba, or the retailer, Domayne, were responsible for this.

In this case, it's the user that screwed up. They chose the wrong country settings and were stuck with the wrong keyboard layout. Perhaps they should have thought before setting the country location to UK, Uzbekistan or Uruguay.

I'm often less than sympathetic to MS in this blog, but in this case why shouldn't they charge for their time? This isn't anything to do with them.

That said, it's pretty sad that neither Toshiba nor Domayne could figure out what the problem was. Perhaps their techs need a copy of PCs for Dummies.

Vista activation debacle

It's always good to see an Aussie website at the top of Techmeme however of the topic of today's Australian Personal Computer article on changing drivers triggering Windows locking him out of his own computer is not something to celebrate.

While James Brennan's story of updating drivers prompting Windows to lock him out of his system is disturbing, the comments are even more worrying.

Readers have stories of changing USB drives, disabling services and using the encryption functions all triggering the Windows activation process.

For a computer tech, this causes serious problems. If the tech does something innocent and sets off this process, it's the tech who is going to be held accountable.

It also boggles my mind how much this costs Microsoft in support calls. On top of the damage to their reputation, the cost of answer the calls and fixing the problems must be horrendous.

The whole idea of Windows activation is flawed. The fact it's been registered once should be enough. If the customer adds external drives, updates software or even swaps out motherboards, it should be of no business to Microsoft.

Part of the problem MS have with Vista is they allowed DRM and anti piracy measures to take too much of a front seat. They need to stop obsessing about their customers being thieves.

Once they focus on what is the core reason why we buy software, then perhaps we'll avoid future debacles like what we see with Windows Vista.

Bigpond's lousy value

Choice magazine's Internet satisfaction survey gave a big whack to Australia's Internet industry.

While the headline shows the dissatisfaction with Bigpond, Optus also gets a whack about it's slow and incompetent support which is fair enough as well.

It's interesting how Choice claims cost is the biggest factor. One thing I've criticised Choice for is it's unrealistic conclusions in IT related matters. This is another case in point.

Providers of cheap services have to skimp somewhere to make a buck, customers have to understand that a cheap provider cannot provide services of a premium provider and still stay in business. The writers at Choice don't seem to understand this.

That said, the SMH quote from the Bigpond spokesman is a laugh, "the provider was not trying to compete on price and was offering a premium service."

The joke here is Bigpond doesn't provide a provide a premium service, they charge a premium price for a cheap and somewhat poor service.

My favourite tech editor, David Richards of Smarthouse News provides a few more laughs on this.

David has in the past been a big critic of Choice but in recent times Bigpond has been receiving his ire. So it's quite funny to see David approvingly quoting Choice in a article headlining "Telstra BigPond Sucks And That's Offical."

Yes that is a typo in the headline. It's another reason why I enjoy Smarthouse News editorials so much.

2Clix appoints administrators

Stan Beer at IT Wire reports software company 2Clix, notorious for suing the Whirlpool website, has gone under.

It's sad to hear of any company folding. As a business owner myself I appreciate just how hard it is to keep a business running, particularly in the technology sector.

But you can't help but think the management bought negative karma down upon themselves with their legal stunt. What's worse, Stan Beer or myself probably wouldn't have noticed their problems had they not served writs.

The big problem for 2Clix customers is what happens to their data. Given the application locks the data away, 2Clix users are at the mercy of the administrators and any buyers of the package.

This is another reason why we urge business not to go near software that locks data away. Make sure any system you buy has an open backup utility and has an export to CSV function.

Your data is your businesses' greatest asset. You need to protect it.

Commission Junction doesn't want me

Like Darren Rowse at Problogger, I'm finding Google Adsense isn't quite doing the job for the IT Queries website.

The problem is Google does its job too well. The content of the site means the Google Ads are largely for dodgy spyware checkers and registry cleaners.

Funny enough, some of them being ones I rant about on this site.

I want to sign up with commission junction, but they make it impossible as the CAPTCHA is missing from the signup page.

This isn't the first time I've had to struggle with online advertising companies. They seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to create an account.

One would think that these companies, being the engine of Web 2.0 they claim to be, would have their systems right.

Sadly it appears not.

It's a shame really because I'd like to try out Commission Junction as they seem to have some high quality advertisers.

Playing with my mind

I'm working on the keyboard chapter of the Australian PC for Dummies this morning.

While working on it, I start finding the keyboard doesn't respond to every keystroke which means I'm dropping letters. To say this is really, really frustrating is an understatement.

So I start my keyboard troubleshooting.

1. Do a couple of reboots, same problem

2. Redetect the keyboard. Same problem

3. Change batteries, mutter about cheapo no name batteries. Same Problem.

There must be a hardware problem with the keyboard, which is hardly surprising seeing my track record in smashing the things.

Then I notice my web browser is working fine. So too does Notepad and a new Word document.

In fact everything works but the chapter I'm working on.

So, it's the document. I spend some time messing around and find by turning off and on the track changes, spelling and grammar checkers all comes good.

A lesson there and something for the ITQueries website.

Answering the phone

I'm back on deck after a week away and ploughing through the zillion emails, subscriptions and blog entries that I've missed.

One post that caught my eye was an entry in the Sydney Morning Herald Enterprise Blog about "being too honest in your business", Valerie Khoo encountered an e-commerce site that outright stated they won't answer their phones.

I can understand this. Coming back from holidays I dreaded my message bank. Eight calls had me paralysed for two days.

Those eight calls sitting in my unanswered message queue were more intimidating than several hundred emails.

The worst part is technology brings out the worst in people. A normally calm, patient, rational person often becomes a rampaging, demanding fool when faced with anything related to computers. So I'm firmly on the side of the "Internet Ferals".

I don't think it's going to help their business though, Valerie went elsewhere for her purchase and the comments on her post are less than impressed with the business not having a contact number.

I tend to agree that not having a landline is the kiss of death for an online business. I wouldn't shop at one that didn't and I certainly wouldn't recommend it others.

The lesson for any technology based businesses is that customers, as painful as they can be to deal with, are the reason for the business' existence.

Without 'em, you don't have a business.

Get the phone, hire someone patient with a nice phone manner and get the systems to allow them to find and fix problems.

Or just don't bother going into business.

Blithering morons

It's 1.24am and I'm driving up the coast with a car full of kids later this morning. So I'm in a particularly cranky mood right now.

That is just the frame of mind to be in when confronted with garbage like this.

In Googling this wonderful product that detects malware on Macs, I stumbled on the Download.com review. This is what the reviewer has to say about Scan and Repair Utilities 2007,

The Description Box tempts you with information about each problem. However, the only information we found listed for every problem was: "This threat is currently being researched for better identification.

You can't repair a single problem. If you want to find out how well this program works in the repair department, you must register. Further, using Live Update crashed the program for our testers."

So what did this guy rate a program that does absolutely nothing?

Three out of five.

Let's get this right, the program does nothing and crashes when you try to update it, yet you still give it a 60% approval rating?

What a blithering moron, I bet he struggles with the concept of phishing.

Oh no! My Mac has a Windows Trojan!

In doing some further research on the Skype spam I thought I'd run the online test on my Mac.

Sure enough, it operates exactly the same way in Safari as it does on a Windows Box.

According to this wonderful piece of software, my iMac is infected with the following malware.

• Backdoor:Win32/NT Root
• Backdoor: Win32/Sivuxa
• Trojan.Caijing

Funny enough, that's exactly what my Windows machine has according to this marvellous utility.

Darn it! I knew I should have never put my precious Mac on the network with those horrid, low class Windows boxes. Now it's caught their horrible disease.

The scary thing with this is some people will shell out the 19.95 this rubbish asks for to clean their Macs.

Skype malware, Onlinealert and ScanAlert

One of my computers has Skype Chat turned on. This afternoon I received a message from Security Center ® (Offline) Skype™ Chat (yes those registration marks are what was there) warning me that WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION.

The warning directs the reader to "download the patch" from a website calling itself Onlinealert.

Normally I'd disregard this but this is my test machine that I know is clean so I thought I'd visit the Onlinealert page.

Sure enough, this site runs a fake scan from an organisation called ScanAlert that gives a bunch of fake malware detections.

I don't know how much ScanAlert charge for their wares, but given the false results I personally wouldn't be trusting them too much to keep my computer hacker safe.

Incidentally, the Onlinealert domain is registered to someone in Moscow calling themselves Sergei Machorin.

I'm sure if Sergei really exists, he'll make a few bucks from people who've been fooled into this little scam.

It will be interesting to see what Skype have to say about this.

Ten years doing the radio

I was going through my old files today and found the fax that started my ABC Radio spots.

I didn't realise it, but sometime last month I passed the ten years mark of doing the Weekend show.

I feel old.

The Australian Technology Blog

A new blog is born to join the other seven million created every day.

I've set up the Australian Technology Blog to discuss technology issues and how they affect Australians, both individuals and businesses.

This blog will continue as my outlet for non-technology issues and generally venting my spleen.

I hope you can visit both.

The Lonely Planet sale

In my days of backpacking through the mid and late 80s, Lonely Planet books were by far the most reliable guidebooks to Asia and the more out of the way locations. Since the arrival of the Internet, their Thorn Tree forums have been invaluable when trying to find information on obscure destinations.

So it's heartening to hear the founders, Peter and Maureen Wheeler, have sold 40% of their stake to BBC for a reported $100 million.

I heard Maureen Wheeler on ABC Radio this morning and she said the reason for selling was because they found making money out of the websites too hard compared to making money publishing books.

That's an interesting perspective we can all dwell on. If it's too hard for content rich websites like Lonely Planet, how are humble blogs like this going to survive?

Incidentally, their announcement on the Lonely Planet website is absolutely terrific. A great example of how businesses can use the web.

I suspect they are being a bit too modest about their abilities to deal with the so-called new media.

On the bleeding edge

I had to chuckle reading the Australian IT profile of Gus Kollar, the chief of IT during the Sydney APEC conference.

The older operating system didn't trouble Kollar too much, but the apprehension in his voice was evident when Vista was mentioned.

"We were so courageous to dive deep into Vista," he says.

"Surprisingly, there weren't too many issues."

Phew! I'd hate the software to confuse President George. He might think he's in another country or at another conference.

The Telstra and government war continues

Telstra's clumsy attempt to buy into the Federal election campaign has prompted a predictably fierce response from the minister.

Helen Coonan is quite right, in her own words; "It could have stepped up to the plate. It could have been a leader in rolling out broadband".

Telstra could have been the world leader. Instead Telstra spent ten years doing everything it could to protect its revenues and stymie Australian Internet growth.

What really gets me cranky is throughout this entire period, the current Federal government either fully owned or had a controlling interest in Telstra. They could have fixed all of this in one board meeting.

Instead they sat on their backsides and ignored the urgings of the IT industry, farmers, small business and even Bill Gates. The only thing they did was to fully sell off Telstra at the first opportunity.

Now the Feds find themselves fighting an organisation with a near monopoly that's maximising profits by running down infrastructure and strangling competition.

Rather than blaming Telstra for this situation, Senator Coonan needs to look no further than her boss and the dills he appointed as her predecessors.

Regardless of who is the next communications minister and of what party they are from, the next three years are going to be a very interesting and difficult time for them.

At least we'll be able to say that one minister will be working hard for their money.