Category Archives: Rants

The Great Google Chrome Con

Posted by on May 15, 2010 4 comments

Google Chrome is now at version 5 despite being only four years old. Version 6 is in beta. Before I began my rant I just need to explain how the versioning of programs usually works. The first number is the major build number should only change when there have been major changes to the program. The smaller numbers are there to indicate smaller changes such as security and bug fixes. Since it’s release Chrome, as far as I can see, has only had two major changes to it and they are the addition of themes and extensions.

Firefox has been around about eight years and is only at version 3.5. Opera has been around over ten years and is only at version 10.50. With both of these browser they have only changed the major build number when they have made major changes to their browser.

So why is Google increasing Chrome’s build number more often that it has birthdays? Well others believe this is Google’s attempt at making the gullible believe that Chrome is a more mature program than it actually is. The less computer savvy are going to look at it and think, “Oh it’s on version 5 so must have been around a long time”. I tend to agree with their opinion as there is no other reason for Google to be doing this.

Stupid Items For Sale

Posted by on April 28, 2010 1 comment

I just noticed an advert in the adsense I use on my site that is offering 12,000+ ebooks on a DVD for £14.95. So I thought I’d take a look at the site. The image they use to show the DVD you are buying is obviously just a Lightscribe DVD they have burnt the books on to. A quick look at the ebooks they are charging you £14.95 shows that they are all in fact ebooks that are available to download for free anyway from sites such as Project Gutenberg. So apart from about £1 they paid for the blank DVD and then about £0.50 it would cost them to post it that’s about £13 profit in their pocket because of gullible people. A search on Ebay shows me that they are also trying to sell the same DVD on there as well.

If you want free ebooks then check out my previous post which contains links to sites offering both classic and new works for you to download for free.

Ebook Pricing

Posted by on February 5, 2010 4 comments

Thanks to a couple I am friends with I now have a Sony PRS-600 ebook reader. Brilliant as my book shelves are full. Anyway I thought I would buy some books to go on it from some of my favourite authors. My first port of call was Waterstones where I did a quick search for Neal Asher. For the hardback copy of his book Orbus they are charging £16.19 (apparently saving me £1.80). For the ebook version which requires no manufacturing, incurs no transportation costs and they only need to keep a single copy of on the server they want £14.39 and WHSmith’s want £12.59 for the ebook version. How the hell can they justify this? Another of Neal Asher’s book, Brass Man, goes for £7.99 for the paperback and they want £6.39 for the ebook version but apparently it’s only that price because it’s in the sale :? The same ebook on WHSmith’s is £5.59.

Spyware Block Lists

Posted by on January 19, 2010 No comments

For years now I have used both SpywareBlaster and SpyBot to immunise my web browsers against malware. They both do this by adding a list of known malware sites to the blocked list of your web browser and, in the case of Spybot, also adding them to the hosts file. They also help to stop tracking cookies which are used to log what type of websites you visited.

Anyway I was updating them both today and I got to thinking, "How often do they check that the sites in their block lists are still active?" At present SpyBot is saying it has immunised me against 130712 sites and SpywareBlaster says 13138 sites. So I decided to test a random selection of 20 sites they have blocked. Out of the 20 all the domains had now expired and pointed to nothing (resulting in a oops message in the browser) or they were now a domain landing page. That’s one of these stupid pages you sometimes end up on when you mistype a web address which has a list of links loosely based upon the domain name.

I know both of these programs are free but would it be to hard for them to write a program that checks their list every so often to remove dead domains? The reason I say this is because Internet Explorers block list is stored in the registry and this can slow down your computers boot up time. Also the more sites are blocked the slower your web browser may become. SO come on programmers. Just write a program that runs through your list once a month and see if they are still active or not.

Rising Antivirus Review

Posted by on April 19, 2009 21 comments

I recently decided to try / review a new anti virus program I had heard about called Rising Antivirus. Now my first issue with this anti virus is the fact that the installer is over 60MB and the download was slow as hell. Took me around 30 minutes to download and I’m on a 20Mb connection. Once installed it takes over 200MB of hard drive space. First thing I did was run an update and it seemed to me that every component had an update and given I had only just downloaded the program this seems excessive. Next I ran a scan of the local drives. After twenty minutes I stopped it as it had only done about 5% and was saying it had over an hour left to go. Given this was my laptop with little on it this was far from acceptible.

Now we get to the main reason I swiftly uninstalled it. I downloaded the Eicar test file which is a standard file that all antivirus programs recognise as a test file so you can test if your antivirus is working or not. So I put the eicar.com file on my desktop and ran it. Rising Antivirus did absolutely nothing. I can accept it not detecting it during the download because my favourite free antivirus, AntiVir, only scans files when they are opened or read. To not detect the test file when run makes me wonder what else it doesn’t detect. I told it to scan the eicar.com file and it alerted me that it was a virus (well a test file which is what it should report it as) but not even a beep from Rising Antivirus when I run the file. In fact I had to turn Rising’s detection level up to high to get it to report it as a virus when I opened it. Even then I could see the command window in the background that eicar.com opens so I’m not even sure that if it had been a virus Rising Antivirus would of stopped it doing anything.

So my advice is avoid this anti virus like the plague. The best free anti virus, in my opinion, is AntiVir and the next best free one is Avast. I can no longer even recommend AVG as third place because all reports say as of version 8 AVG has become a resource hog that slows your computer down.

Google Adsense’s Lack Of Ethics

Posted by on April 10, 2009 7 comments

Google is a company which prides it’s self on it’s ethics. It only gave the bare minimum information when ordered to and went out of it’s way to get Google in to China. So why is it that their Adsense side of the business seems to accept adverts from the dodgiest of companies? Just lately I have found myself constantly adding new urls to the blocked advert list of my Adsense acount. Several of the urls I have blocked all are just cloaking urls that all point to the same site. The program in question here is called Registry Cleaner Pro. They make wild claims in their adverts that their program fixes IE 8 and also fixes nearly every Windows error you could possibly encounter. I currently have about five urls on my blocked list that point to this company.

And then there are the companies who’s adverts offer to let you download Spybot for free. Errr SpyBot IS FREE!!! Just go to the official Spybot site at safer-networking.org and download it for free. The sites that post these adverts expect you to sign up to them which is not free and therefore their adverts, in my opinion, are illegal in most countries.

I’m more and more tempted to stop using Adsense if only I could find an affiliate company with some kind of ethics.

You can see my list of blocked domains after the break.
Read more »

Far Cry Movie

Posted by on April 2, 2009 No comments

I’ve just watched the Far Cry movie and I have to say that it wasn’t as bad as some people make out. In fact it’s pretty good. Most people just see that it’s made by Uwe Boll and think it’s going to be rubbish without even watching it just because quite a lot of Uwe Bolls movies are exceptionally dire (Postal anyone?). So what if it doesn’t stick excatly to the script of the game? What movie based on a computer game ever has? And if it had what would be the point in watching it as you’d know the story from the game.

OK I’ll admit the CGI of the helicopter crashing could of been better but I have seen worse. Other than that I was quite impressed. The acting is pretty good all round and the story not only makes sense and keeps to the rough plot of the game but it also doesn’t slow down to the point you’re bored.

So if you’re after a movie that doesn’t require to much brain power then give Far Cry a go.

To all the people on IMDB who rated it low what planet are you on or do yo ujust see the Uwe Boll name and automatically give it a low rating without actually watching it?

Bad Web Devs

Posted by on March 30, 2009 No comments

I’m a hobbyist web developer and nothing annoys me more than web sites that have obviously paid for someone to build their sites but whoever has built it has done a half arsed job.

My main gripe at the moment is sites that require you to have cookies enabled but have terrible code in place for if you don’t.

A good example is Game who put you in to an infinite redirect loop if you have cookies disabled. In fact you have to enable cookies on their site to see the page that tells you that you needs cookies enabled to view the site :|

Another bad one I just found, and this one is really really bad, is download.com. You don’t need cookies to view the site but if you have them disabled and click through to view a programs page your browsers memory usage goes through the roof. I tested this in Firefox 3.1 b3, IE8 and Chrome. With all three browsers I had to use task manager to close them thanks to download.com’s sloppy web code.

So please, if you are going to write a site that requires that visitors accept cookies, make sure you have good code in place to handle people like me who have cookies disabled.

Remove Internet Explorer 8

Posted by on March 21, 2009 22 comments

Have you recently installed the newly released Internet Explorer 8? Realised what a piece of crap it is?

Yesterday I installed IE8 on this Vista desktop just to give it a whirl. For a start it takes it about 10 – 20 seconds to even open and load the first page. Also when I chose to open a link in a new tab the new tab would appear but the page would never load. It would get stuck on loading. It also altered my Explorer settings. I had Explorer (Windows Explorer) set to open folders in the same window yet IE8 changed it so they opened in a new window. So I decided to remove IE8 and go back to IE7. Luckily Internet Explorer 8 is classed as an updated and not a different program so doing this isn’t that hard as I explain below.

Update: I found out that the reason IE8 was taking so long at start up was the passive anti malware provided by SpyBot and SpywareBlaster.
Read more »

Internet Explorer 8

Posted by on March 20, 2009 No comments

Just found out that Microsoft has finally released Internet Explorer 8 for public consumption. Now whilst IE 8 is a step in the right direction it is far from perfect. A good example of a typical Microsoft cock up can be seen here. So do you update? The decision is yours but just remember there are many alternatives these days such as Firefox, Flock, Opera, Chrome, Safari and many more.

Post Popularity Graphing by Knowledge Ring