Technology Tales

Over the history of the internet, I have seen halcyon online dreams turn sour, with the world of Web 2.0 suffering the same lurch. It was only in the mid-nineties that the web was considered a levelling platform and a place for interaction and sharing. It also was a lot safer than it is today, an ironic observation given how e-commerce has taken off until you realise the financial gain from scams like phishing. Human nature does have a habit of spoiling things and the result is the number of patches that Windows has needed over the years, that and the expansion of security software from being all about antivirus packages to the inclusion of anti-spam, anti-spyware and firewall applications.

You would think that the above would have all but killed off the optimism that abounded in the late nineties, only for it to resurface again with the explosion of the blogosphere and, of course, there is Second Life. But there are signs of slippage even in this brave new world: comment spam has become a scourge for blogs, though the likes of Akismet and the WordPress Bad Behaviour plug-in see off most of it for me.

Then, there remains flaming on web forums. In fact, what has prompted this post is my observation of the transformation of a friendly forum thread into a hostile exchange. It started out as a communication regarding the welfare of someone who needed to retire from the annual Rab TGO Challenge with a high fever. Everything was going well until someone poked a hole in another poster's grammar, yet it was the mention of fitness that really turned things sour, especially when someone’s admission of a 20-a-day smoking habit drew the ire from a fitness fanatic. While it was all unnecessary, it shows how people can mess up with technology: to realise those optimistic dreams that I mentioned earlier, we have to change to make it happen. For now, I suppose that we’ll have to live in hope…

Having owned a licence of ZoneAlarm Security Suite 6, I was wondering if I would get a pop-up inviting me to upgrade, free gratis as I have a subscription, to the latest version. In the middle of my Office 2007 installation activities, the notification duly turned up to prompt me to download and install the update to version 7.

The first change you will notice is in the branding, ZoneAlarm is now owned by Check Point Software Technologies, but the real reason for my interest is my hearing that Kaspersky antivirus technology is now part of the package. In addition, learning capabilities have also been added so that you don’t get annoyed by the thing asking you if it is alright for a certain application to do something or other that seems vaguely out of order, all the time. This has been part of Norton Internet Security for a while and is certainly an asset; Windows Vista’s User Access Control feature would do well to implement some of this learning, given what I have heard of its activities. And ZoneAlarm 6 was prone to nag you a lot as well, at least it did for me.

The installation went well for me, apart from the non-activation of the antivirus functionality. This took an update and a reboot to sort out, leaving me to think that it might have emanated from the changeover to British Summer Time that took place last weekend. I shall be keeping an eye out for what happens when the changeover to Winter time takes place (don’t worry, I fully plan to enjoy the intervening time; I have more than learned to enjoy each season for its delights). Having a time changeover like this knock out your antivirus software is far from ideal. Other than that, everything is working fine, especially as the firewall is staying silent as it continues to learn.

This morning, I got up to find my main computer powered off after I left it on overnight for a spyware scan by Webroot Spy Sweeper. After satisfying myself that it was dead, I tried popping a new fuse in the plug. What I saw next was far from being a pretty sight: shorting in the PSU. The fact that it took out a new 5 A fuse was neither here nor there (they are 20p a piece at where I replenished my supply: they may be cheaper elsewhere but what’s 20p these days?); thoughts of fried PC hardware are far from pleasant, especially the vision of losing data and expensive software purchases because a hard drive got fried by a shorting PSU. A whole new bare-bones system from the likes of Novatech was appearing very ominously on my horizon.

There was only one thing for it: try another PSU and see if everything works. So, it was off to a nearby branch of PC World for a replacement. While I know that there were other options, I preferred to get this problem sorted out pronto to put my mind at ease, if at all possible. The old PSU got taken out and the new one plugged in as part of pre-installation testing. Thankfully, I saw the Windows start up screen and the omens were good; it later turned out that my data had not been harmed either. Initial problems with keyboard and mouse recognition were resolved by a reboot, as was an IP address conflict that had resulted because my back-up machine was on throughout all of this. All in all, things turned out well after a solid lesson in backing up data outside the PC on which it resides. Maybe an online service such as Diino could be very useful.

I do seem to have an issue with PSU’s giving up the ghost; perhaps it's the fact that I run them overnight a lot. This incident caused to upgrade from a 450 W Jeantech unit to a 500 W one. Though the PSU that I had before the 450 W unit was higher rated, it couldn’t cope with the power demands of the machine it was powering up. The result was that it cut out a lot at start-up time, an annoying habit that I tolerated for longer than I really should. I’ll keep an eye on things as I go…