Failure is the Key to Success

Wordpress 2.6 was released late last week, so I updated my test blog to check that everything worked before updating my live blogs.

The upgrade was straight forward and all my plugins activated without any apparent issue. However, when I checked my stats, the page wouldn’t load any details, just a blank page. I have used FireStats since migrating to Wordpress and had got used to the results it gives, so I headed over to the FireStats site to see if there was an upgrade. I found version 1.5.12 and so downloaded and installed it. To be on the safe side, I installed to a new database so that I didn’t have to upgrade my existing stats database. This didn’t resolve my blank stats page issue and gave me some messages about features needing a higher version of MySQL than my host 1and1 provides, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled my previous version 1.4.4.

Continue reading » Wordpress 2.6 and Firestats

Tags:FireStats,Wordpress 2.6

I use Trillian as my instant messaging client. It allows me to be signed in with both Yahoo and Microsoft messaging without having to have two clients running.

A problem I had been having with it was after waking my laptop from hibernation, the Microsoft connection would fail to reconnect. Yahoo would reconnect without problem, but Microsoft would keep trying for about 10 minutes before finally failing. If I did a Global Disconnect before hibernating and then a Global Reconnect after waking it up, then everything worked fine.

Well it worked fine providing I remembered to reconnect after waking up. This didn’t always happen, as my post a few days ago about my unexpected Plugoo message shows.

Continue reading » Trillian reconnection problem

Back in April I posted ‘How often do you update your software?‘ when I talked checking the versions of installed software other than just Windows and AntiVirus.

Anyway, yesterday, being totally certain that I was up to date, I ran the Secunia website Software Inspector on our desktop and was surprised to find a few software applications showing as out of date. Adobe Flash player was a version behind and the previous version of SunJava was still installed despite the current version being installed. I have had this before with SunJava, as it doesn’t uninstall the old version when upgrading, so I should have remembered. The software inspector explains this and details how to resolve it (remove old versions from Add or Remove Programs).

My AntiVirus software, Avast, checks for updates every 4 hours and is set to audibly announce the updates. After a while you get used to the ‘Virus database has been updated’ message and I personally won’t turn it off. If you do not have current antivirus software or your existing software subscription is expiring, I would thoroughly recommend Avast, it is free for home use and the virus signatures are regularly updated, often a couple of times a day.

Tags:anti virus,antivirus,software updates

I saw a post on Go! Smell The Flowers the other day when I joined BlogCatalog that reminded me of something I haven’t posted about.

About 5 years ago in June 2002, I downloaded and installed the Seti@Home software. The Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project uses spare time on your computer to analyse the signals from the radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory searching for signs of intelligence.

In early 2005, a new version of the software was released. This version ran on the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) platform, which was design to be modular allowing clients for other purposes to be released. I’m still searching for aliens, but I’m also taking part in the following projects:

• ClimatePrediction - experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century
• Einstein - search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors
• Predictor - predict protein structure from protein sequence to address critical biomedical questions of protein-related diseases
• Rosetta - determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases

You can just do this individually or join one of the many teams that do this competitively. Being a bit of a nutter with a liking for Monty Python, I had to join The Knights Who Say Ni! team, who are without exception stark raving mad. This explains my name in the team; the Knights are searching for a Shrubbery and with the name Hedges what else could I be other than ‘I am a Shrub’.

Tags:boinc,knights who say ni!,seti

A couple of days ago I finally got around to scanning the negatives of the photos I took of the lunar eclipse on 3rd March.

I set up my film scanner and scanned the films in the same way as I had with previous films. However, the results I got were absolutely awful. Instead of a black sky with the moon, I had a very grainy mottled green/grey sky. As I already had a set of prints from when the film was developed, I knew what it should look like and my scans were not it.

When I had first installed the Dimage Scan software on my computer I had installed versions 1.0 and 1.1. For some reason I had problems with version 1.1 and was unable to save the images that I scanned using it. Version 1.0 worked and gave me good images and so keen to play with my new toy I ignored the problem with 1.1 and pressed on with using version 1.0. This was slow, taking about 10 minutes to scan an image, but I wrote this off as an investment to get the films into digital format. Of course this was over 2 years ago and so I had totally forgotton about version 1.1. Anyway, I ran up version 1.1 and scanned one of the moon images and it looked just like the print and nothing like the previous scan. So that was the good news, at least the scanner worked properly, I just had to be able to saved the better images.

I download the latest version from the Konica-Minolta website, uninstalled my copy and reinstalled it. Success, now I could save the scans.

There was another plus to this, using the new software, the time to scan a negative at the highest resolution I could (2800dpi) is only about 2.5 minutes. This meant that I was able to rescan the 26 images later that evening.

This then got me thinking, I had already scanned 10 films and burnt 6 to DVD for long term storage. Did this mean that there was better image possible from the films I had already scanned. So, I did some tests and when I looked in the shadows of the original scans compared to a new scan of the same image, I was able to see the same noise instead of black and a grainier image. The saving grace is that I have found this fairly on during my scans rather than 40 or 50 films in. As the scan speed is much quicker it shouldn’t take too long to get back to where I was before I discovered this.

Original scan
New scan

So anyway, after all that, my photos of the Lunar Eclipse March 2007 are up on my gallery.

Tags:film scanner,lunar eclipse,negative scanner,scanner software

This will only relate to Windows systems.

The first two are the types of update that most people will consider.

Operating system patches.

I have Windows set to download the patches as they become available and notify me. I then usually install within the next couple of days.

Anti-Virus

This is set to download and install automatically. The Avast software I use checks every 4 hours to see if there are updates available.

But what about the other software that you have installed? You probably have things like Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, Java and a multitude of other applications which also have security issues and updates to resolve them. You may remember to update some of them, but are you sure you got them all? The Secunia website has a Software Inspector that will check your system for software versions and provide updates or links to the application website. The inspector requires Javascript enabled to work.

Even if you think your Windows system is up to date, it might be worth a check, it only takes a minute.

Tags:security updates,software updates