According to records, I first purchased darkbee.com back in 2000. Since that time, I've added a few bits and pieces here and there, but for the most part it's been stagnant, not really doing anything other than gathering virtual dust, greeting occasional search engine bots, and receiving even less occasional "real" visitors.*
I've detailed some of the reasoning behind this in an article on darkbee.com, but to summarize here it's partly because I spent more time working on how it looks than what's on it, and partly because I stuck with a host which made it difficult for me to update content (through no fault of their own). Well, everything changed when I really started to play with content management systems and in particular TikiWiki. I had run across TikiWiki when I was looking for a possible Wiki to use at work. It's a really heavy-duty CMS, centered around a Wiki, but with many other features such as image galleries, forums, blogs, group and private calendars and the list goes on. Anyway, it dawned on me that my time would be better spent actually creating content rather than trying to code a website with very little content. I thought about using TikiWiki for darkbee.com, but concluded that it was overkill for such a small personal site. Consequently, I began looking at other smaller alternatives and came across Web-App.org, which seem to fit the bill perfectly. I installed it and began to try it out.
Once I had customized Web-App to capture the look and feel of the original darkbee.com site, I was finally convinced that this was the way to go. So now I have a great website that allows me to focus solely on adding new material, and maybe even build a small community of like-minded users. And herein lies another consideration in that, websites are no longer static pages of plain text, they are centers for collaboration, communication and general interaction. Using Web-App allows me to have features like forums, that I never could have coded myself (or at least, never would have finished coding!), which in turn adds the interaction element to my site. With that said, I'd like to invite you to visit the "new and improved" darkbee.com, and who knows, maybe join and make a few posts/comments yourself!
*Spot the pattern; this blog hasn't exactly been a hot-bed of activity either!
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Monday, June 30, 2008
Why I put my computer on a diet
I've recently updated my anti-virus scanner and anti-spyware programs to the latest versions but they have left my computer feeling bloated, sluggish and in need of a workout, so I've had to say goodbye to those applications. I'm disheartened by it (so much so that I felt compelled to post!) because prior to these upgrades these programs had served me exceptionally well. I had been using AVG Free and Ad-Adware programs for quite a few years now and they were always high on my recommendation list for any home user wanting free anti-virus and anti-spyware programs respectively. However, both have recently released new versions and both have almost instantly disappointed me. Both have turned into the bloated, resource hogging commercial cousins that I have long vowed to avoid.
In the case of Ad-Aware 2008 it has more than doubled in download size. Perhaps this says something about the increase in spyware that is out there but I can't understand why such a drastic change in size of the base program is necessary. At first, I was quite happy with AA2008, it seemed to do the job of scanning for and removing spyware just as good, if not better than it's predecessor, but then little things started to annoy me and I experienced some instabilities. First off, I found that whenever I did an update if forced me to download languages that I have no use for (while there was a check box there, I could not remove the check mark by clicking it). That just plain irritates me and makes Lavasoft look stupid. Why waste their bandwidth having me download languages I'm never going to use. Now granted the size of these downloads probably only amounts to a few kilobytes but times that by a few hundred thousand and that's a lot of wasted data. I can understand restricting users of the free version to not be able to change certain options but in this case it's just plain stupidity.
Overall the more I used AA2008 the more I disliked it and the I became frustrated with the user interface, which I believe is clumsy, needlessly cluttered and a bit too Fisher Price for my liking. However in the defense of AA2008, I don't think the interface of Ad-Aware has even been the greatest; not very intuitive but in the past I could live with it (it's almost like I was looking for reasons not to like AA2008 by this point, which is never a good thing!)
However, the thing that forced me to ditch AA2008 was it's ability to crash on a fairly consistent basis and usually when doing updates. What good is a program that needs the most up-to-date information if I can't update it? I never had any problems updating the previous version of Ad-Aware and this was a real turn-off and made me question the stability of the program in general.
For me the story of AVG version 8 has been even more dire. It has caused a dramatic drop in performance of my Pentium 3 1.4Ghz machine with 512MB of RAM, running Windows XP. Ok, so it's not exactly the most kick-butt computer out there but it more than meets the specifications for running Windows XP and up to version 7.5 of AVG was doing quite nicely. However, upon installing version 8, I noticed that the time that my computer took to initialize after logging in went from a few seconds to a couple of minutes (God knows what the AVG resident scanner is doing, presumably scanning every single startup application and process). I know that it's AVG because I've been able to get task manager open and watch the processes and sure enough avgsx.exe sits there taking up most of the processor time.
Another new feature of AVG is the link scanner that works while your browsing, deeming links safe for you or not. A nice idea but when your already slow computer (slow because of all the other stuff that AVG is doing) becomes even slower, you quickly want to know how to turn off this 'exciting new feature'. But it gets worse! Turn it off you can, but then the icon in the system tray tells you that AVG is in an error state and no amount of fiddling with options will make it go away. To me, this defeats the purpose of having a system tray icon if I am forced to have it display a permanent error. How am I supposed to know if there is a genuine error?
I've read on the web a lot of complaints about the built in web safe features of the new AVG and it seems that most people's immediate reaction is to disable them. In fact there exists a command line that you can use when initiating the install to turn off all these new fancy resource-sapping features: c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
It's a sad state of affairs when you have to turn stuff off BEFORE you've even installed the software! All-in-all besides the startup time increase, general application load time has also increased to the point where it's annoying. All of this has turned me off of AVG and I will no longer be recommending it to anybody unless I become aware of major improvements. To me AVG now sits right up there with the likes of Norton and McAfee as being a big fat resource hogger.
I suppose a lot of you out there might say, you never paid for these programs so what they hell are you complaining about. Well that is true, but I also don't want the developers of these programs to think that they've done a fantastic job, when they clearly haven't. It's disappointing to me because these were good products up until recently but now there's nothing that stands them out from the crowd anymore. Also, I'm not exactly encouraged to spend money on the premium versions if the basic versions aren't even up to par!
For my Anti-virus needs I've now returned to Antivir from Avira which I used to use many moons ago but stopped using once I had discovered AVG, which I deemed to be a more polished product overall. I haven't had much of a chance to compare performance but from my brief try it seems to be that my PC is running as it was before, pre AVG 8. I would have gone back to AVG 7.5 but I figured what's the point of "downgrading" to a product that I know will be defunct at the end of this year anyway (that plus I had flashbacks of Windows Vista versus XP debacle!).
For my spyware needs I've resorted to using Spybot Search and Destroy, which although I find to be a little clumsy and slow at times (the scanning seems to take forever), it seems to do a good job and I've never had any problems of instability with it.
I hope that this is not the emergence of a trend in creating bloated applications that assume you are a running a Cray Super computer so that it doesn't matter how much resources they take up. I have long since abandoned the evils of Adobe's Acrobat Reader which is a ridiculously large 22MB just so that I can read a PDF file! (I use the much more lightweight and significantly smaller open source SumatraPDF). While I will probably NEVER return to using Acrobat Reader, I do hope one day I can return to AVG and Ad-Aware because they were great products, but big improvements in both those apps are needed before that happens!
In the case of Ad-Aware 2008 it has more than doubled in download size. Perhaps this says something about the increase in spyware that is out there but I can't understand why such a drastic change in size of the base program is necessary. At first, I was quite happy with AA2008, it seemed to do the job of scanning for and removing spyware just as good, if not better than it's predecessor, but then little things started to annoy me and I experienced some instabilities. First off, I found that whenever I did an update if forced me to download languages that I have no use for (while there was a check box there, I could not remove the check mark by clicking it). That just plain irritates me and makes Lavasoft look stupid. Why waste their bandwidth having me download languages I'm never going to use. Now granted the size of these downloads probably only amounts to a few kilobytes but times that by a few hundred thousand and that's a lot of wasted data. I can understand restricting users of the free version to not be able to change certain options but in this case it's just plain stupidity.
Overall the more I used AA2008 the more I disliked it and the I became frustrated with the user interface, which I believe is clumsy, needlessly cluttered and a bit too Fisher Price for my liking. However in the defense of AA2008, I don't think the interface of Ad-Aware has even been the greatest; not very intuitive but in the past I could live with it (it's almost like I was looking for reasons not to like AA2008 by this point, which is never a good thing!)
However, the thing that forced me to ditch AA2008 was it's ability to crash on a fairly consistent basis and usually when doing updates. What good is a program that needs the most up-to-date information if I can't update it? I never had any problems updating the previous version of Ad-Aware and this was a real turn-off and made me question the stability of the program in general.
For me the story of AVG version 8 has been even more dire. It has caused a dramatic drop in performance of my Pentium 3 1.4Ghz machine with 512MB of RAM, running Windows XP. Ok, so it's not exactly the most kick-butt computer out there but it more than meets the specifications for running Windows XP and up to version 7.5 of AVG was doing quite nicely. However, upon installing version 8, I noticed that the time that my computer took to initialize after logging in went from a few seconds to a couple of minutes (God knows what the AVG resident scanner is doing, presumably scanning every single startup application and process). I know that it's AVG because I've been able to get task manager open and watch the processes and sure enough avgsx.exe sits there taking up most of the processor time.
Another new feature of AVG is the link scanner that works while your browsing, deeming links safe for you or not. A nice idea but when your already slow computer (slow because of all the other stuff that AVG is doing) becomes even slower, you quickly want to know how to turn off this 'exciting new feature'. But it gets worse! Turn it off you can, but then the icon in the system tray tells you that AVG is in an error state and no amount of fiddling with options will make it go away. To me, this defeats the purpose of having a system tray icon if I am forced to have it display a permanent error. How am I supposed to know if there is a genuine error?
I've read on the web a lot of complaints about the built in web safe features of the new AVG and it seems that most people's immediate reaction is to disable them. In fact there exists a command line that you can use when initiating the install to turn off all these new fancy resource-sapping features: c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
It's a sad state of affairs when you have to turn stuff off BEFORE you've even installed the software! All-in-all besides the startup time increase, general application load time has also increased to the point where it's annoying. All of this has turned me off of AVG and I will no longer be recommending it to anybody unless I become aware of major improvements. To me AVG now sits right up there with the likes of Norton and McAfee as being a big fat resource hogger.
I suppose a lot of you out there might say, you never paid for these programs so what they hell are you complaining about. Well that is true, but I also don't want the developers of these programs to think that they've done a fantastic job, when they clearly haven't. It's disappointing to me because these were good products up until recently but now there's nothing that stands them out from the crowd anymore. Also, I'm not exactly encouraged to spend money on the premium versions if the basic versions aren't even up to par!
For my Anti-virus needs I've now returned to Antivir from Avira which I used to use many moons ago but stopped using once I had discovered AVG, which I deemed to be a more polished product overall. I haven't had much of a chance to compare performance but from my brief try it seems to be that my PC is running as it was before, pre AVG 8. I would have gone back to AVG 7.5 but I figured what's the point of "downgrading" to a product that I know will be defunct at the end of this year anyway (that plus I had flashbacks of Windows Vista versus XP debacle!).
For my spyware needs I've resorted to using Spybot Search and Destroy, which although I find to be a little clumsy and slow at times (the scanning seems to take forever), it seems to do a good job and I've never had any problems of instability with it.
I hope that this is not the emergence of a trend in creating bloated applications that assume you are a running a Cray Super computer so that it doesn't matter how much resources they take up. I have long since abandoned the evils of Adobe's Acrobat Reader which is a ridiculously large 22MB just so that I can read a PDF file! (I use the much more lightweight and significantly smaller open source SumatraPDF). While I will probably NEVER return to using Acrobat Reader, I do hope one day I can return to AVG and Ad-Aware because they were great products, but big improvements in both those apps are needed before that happens!
Monday, March 31, 2008
Earth Hour
I was browsing the web over the weekend and came across a strange sight (no, not 'site', although I do know some strange ones but that's for another post!); The Google search page had been given a black background. Now, I'm used to them changing their logo for special occasions or certain festive seasons but changing the background was something new. I immediately wanted to find out why.
It turns out they were encouraging users to participate in an event called Earth Hour. The idea started out in Sydney, Australia in 2007 whereby businesses and homes would switch off all the lights in their buildings for one hour. Now in 2008, other places around the world joined in. It's a way to say to the world, I'm committed to using less energy and want to make a difference in order to save our planet.
I'm no tree-hugging hippy (with apologies to tree-hugging hippies) but I would like to think of myself as environmentally conscious and I do try to take steps to reduce my personal impact on the environment. so this idea of an "Earth Hour" appealed to me. That said, the event was due to take place on March 29th 2008, at 8PM local time and I happened to be looking at website on March 29th 2008, with about 8 hours to go. However, it's not really a big deal to turn off your lights... I didn't have to arrange for a baby-sitter, or race to hospital breaking all land speed records known to man and nobody had to die. As it turned out, it was quite fun.
My three year old son was in awe of the lights being out and our apartment being lit by candles. He kept asking why we had turned out all the lights and I tried to explain it to him the best I could (in a way that he has a hope of understanding). He didn't seem to care much (hopefully in the future he will) but he did think the candles were cool. It actually felt cozy and warm with candles all over the place (we had them in several rooms) and gave me a great sense of tranquility. I can't quite say I went as far as to immediately begin meditating, I actually watched some TV (yes, I know it's an electrical appliance), but it's a start!
And therein lies the problem with the world today. People are either not willing or refuse to accept that energy consumption and waste production is a problem, or they believe that the problem is not significant enough to warrant any action. it's a crying shame that this is the prevailing attitude since it really wouldn't take much individual effort to have a huge positive impact on our environment.
Now, I'm no scientist but one thing I do know (and I've been saying for some years now), our weather seems to be getting wacky. Not necessarily warmer, but definitely more wild and extreme. I don't know why that is, I'm sure there isn't one single cause that could be pin-pointed as being the culprit but I do know that humans probably account for a large proportion of the cause. Humans are stupid, the only species on Earth that kills themselves and others for fun, greed or out of plain idiocy. So, it's not a great stretch to imagine that we are sucking the life out of our planet and slowly killing ourselves in the process. We have the intellectual power and the physical technology to rapidly slow that process if not eliminate it altogether. Bury your head in the sand if you want but you'll get no thanks from future generations.
Earth Hour is a great opportunity to get involved and stop pretending that we as a species are better than we really are. If simple things like switching lights off when one is not in a room and turning off appliances when they aren't in use is too much effort then we will truly get what we deserve. If, on the other hand, you think that turning your lights off for an hour is not such a horrific prospect after all, then start looking into other small ways in which you can make a difference and save our planet. All it takes to get started is one Earth Hour.
It turns out they were encouraging users to participate in an event called Earth Hour. The idea started out in Sydney, Australia in 2007 whereby businesses and homes would switch off all the lights in their buildings for one hour. Now in 2008, other places around the world joined in. It's a way to say to the world, I'm committed to using less energy and want to make a difference in order to save our planet.
I'm no tree-hugging hippy (with apologies to tree-hugging hippies) but I would like to think of myself as environmentally conscious and I do try to take steps to reduce my personal impact on the environment. so this idea of an "Earth Hour" appealed to me. That said, the event was due to take place on March 29th 2008, at 8PM local time and I happened to be looking at website on March 29th 2008, with about 8 hours to go. However, it's not really a big deal to turn off your lights... I didn't have to arrange for a baby-sitter, or race to hospital breaking all land speed records known to man and nobody had to die. As it turned out, it was quite fun.
My three year old son was in awe of the lights being out and our apartment being lit by candles. He kept asking why we had turned out all the lights and I tried to explain it to him the best I could (in a way that he has a hope of understanding). He didn't seem to care much (hopefully in the future he will) but he did think the candles were cool. It actually felt cozy and warm with candles all over the place (we had them in several rooms) and gave me a great sense of tranquility. I can't quite say I went as far as to immediately begin meditating, I actually watched some TV (yes, I know it's an electrical appliance), but it's a start!
And therein lies the problem with the world today. People are either not willing or refuse to accept that energy consumption and waste production is a problem, or they believe that the problem is not significant enough to warrant any action. it's a crying shame that this is the prevailing attitude since it really wouldn't take much individual effort to have a huge positive impact on our environment.
Now, I'm no scientist but one thing I do know (and I've been saying for some years now), our weather seems to be getting wacky. Not necessarily warmer, but definitely more wild and extreme. I don't know why that is, I'm sure there isn't one single cause that could be pin-pointed as being the culprit but I do know that humans probably account for a large proportion of the cause. Humans are stupid, the only species on Earth that kills themselves and others for fun, greed or out of plain idiocy. So, it's not a great stretch to imagine that we are sucking the life out of our planet and slowly killing ourselves in the process. We have the intellectual power and the physical technology to rapidly slow that process if not eliminate it altogether. Bury your head in the sand if you want but you'll get no thanks from future generations.
Earth Hour is a great opportunity to get involved and stop pretending that we as a species are better than we really are. If simple things like switching lights off when one is not in a room and turning off appliances when they aren't in use is too much effort then we will truly get what we deserve. If, on the other hand, you think that turning your lights off for an hour is not such a horrific prospect after all, then start looking into other small ways in which you can make a difference and save our planet. All it takes to get started is one Earth Hour.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
What is it with these foreign germs!
Since moving to the United States, I've never been so sick! I'm currently feeling like crap, at home, bored to tears but too weak to do anything substantial and too run-down to focus on anything for more than 10 minutes at a time.
I personally blame 3 things for the demise of my health:
I personally blame 3 things for the demise of my health:
- Indoor Heating Systems
- The Weather
- My Son
One of the first things I noticed when I came out here was how dry it is inside. So much so that I insisted we buy a humidifier because I woke up every morning feeling like a 10 year old vacuum bag that has never been cleaned. Not that we don't have heating in the UK (we even have electricity too) but somehow it seems different, the air doesn't seem quite so dry. Perhaps, it's part in due to the climate.
But even this doesn't quite make sense because where I live now is a fairly temperate climate, yes it does get very cold in the winter but there is usually plenty of moisture in the air. I think that it is this cold that is more to blame in terms of the weather. Sometimes it can be quite chilling, the type of weather where you feel cold to the core even if you are wearing several layers. It can get to about -20°C or below sometimes, which is colder than anyone should have to bear!
I hate to point the finger at my son but he has his part to play in all of this too. The reason is that hot bed of germ revelry: Daycare! Yes folks, it's buy one get one free week, every week at daycare, always something making the rounds and sooner or later it's gonna getcha!
Anyway, I need to go lie down now... maybe I'm just a big wuss. Perhaps when I'm better I'll volunteer for Arctic training with the Navy Seals or something to toughen me up a bit.
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