Upgrading Vista to SP1
Ever since Vista was released, and some hardware ceased to work with it, I’ve been waiting for SP1 of the OS, simply because it was said that it would contain more drivers, so there was a small chance that stuff that was busted might come back from the dead. Or, there’s a possibility that it wouldn’t make a difference at all. Only way to find out would be to install it and see. So I got a copy from MSDN and gave it a go. We’ll most likely be installing it on our Vista machines at work anyway, so best to get a little experience with it.
It goes without saying, but here it is anyway - please back up all data on your machine that you can’t afford to lose. There shouldn’t be any problems with running the upgrade, but wouldn’t you rather just feel safe that everything was backed up, just in case?
The whole thing really is fairly straightforward, only about 4 boxes before you just walk away from it and let it do its thing.
Microsoft mentions that it’ll take about an hour to run the complete upgrade, and, quite surprisingly, they weren’t far off. The whole thing was done in about 70 minutes. Ironic, when you consider that I’ve seen Vista estimate that it would take 18,000 *days* to finish copying or moving something on the system. Evidently Microsoft’s time estimation algorithm has gotten a bit better 
So, after running the upgrade, what’s the final verdict? For myself, installing the upgrade didn’t revive any of my dead hardware (scanner, printer), although I did find workarounds for both that allowed me to use both under Vista. But that’s a couple of future posts.
If nothing else, patching your machine with SP1 when it comes out as part of Windows Update will get all currently available patches on your machine, and there’s rarely a downside to that. A lot of people didn’t want to put SP2 on their XP machine when it came out, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone today who would tell you why. It just makes the machine run better.
And in the long run, SP1 will be better for your Vista box as well.
Moving To A New Host
For the last few years, this site has been hosted by my employer, and while that turned into a pretty good deal for me, there were still a few things about it that eventually got me to thinking that it might be time to look for another host.
Security, for one. All that hosting was done for free, and could have theoretically ended on a moment’s notice. Or if I decided to move on to another position somewhere else, I wanted to ensure that there would be no downtime for the site. There was also the fact that uploads to my site had to be done over a secure FTP connection, meaning that I couldn’t just embed images in my posts when using Windows Live Writer, because it doesn’t support SFTP. I would have to upload the image to the site, and then point to it in the post. Not a life altering thing, but still…
So now the site is being hosted by BlueFur.com, a local webhost, and I have to admit to being more than impressed by their whole setup. If anything, their Wordpress configuration script was almost easier to run than the “5 Minute Install” promised by Wordpress.
And another great thing about them is that if you sign up with them, and enter promotion code rtdn they’ll even give you a 15% discount. Hard to beat, especially when the hosting starts at $6.95. So, give them a try and remember the promotional code to get your 15% discount: rtdn.
A Self-Inflicted DDoS
This happens to be a couple of days old, but I just heard about it this morning, so thought I’d post about it. Turns out that the government of Pakistan was a little less than enamoured with YouTube, because they were showing either blasphemous content, or videos that were critical of the government and recent elections, so they issued a decree that Pakistani ISPs needed to block access to YouTube.
Evidently one of the ISPs (PieNet), decided that the best way to do this would be to change the DNS records for YouTube so that they pointed to something a little more appropriate, in their opinion. Apparently they didn’t think this all the way through, though, as it had the effect of knocking YouTube offline for about an hour, and even more dramatically for the Pakistani ISPs, they were now handling all of the DNS requests for YouTube, which brought their own segment of the Internet crashing to the ground under the crush of bandwidth.
PCCW, which is the primary carrier of Pakistan’s traffic, then determined that until they could get this sorted out, the best way to deal with it would be to knock the *entire country* offline. Effectively they suffered a self-inflicted DDoS attack.
Now, China has a history of changing DNS entries inside their country in order to block web users from getting to some sites, but evidently they’re a little better at doing it because it never gets outside the country. Not that it’s right, but they don’t bork the whole internet due to their censorship. However, whatever the Pakistani ISP did really messed things up, and it’s scary to think that it was seemingly that simple to knock off one of the busiest sites on the Internet.
To say nothing of the horror that geeks everywhere must have felt when they couldn’t watch the dancing cats or the ripped music videos or TV shows.
But what if it had been Google that they pulled down? Or a large-scale national ISP? While this incident may have been accidental, hopefully it’s not a sign of things to come.
Northern Voice 2008
The Moose is Loose again. That’s right, it’s time for the 2008 version of NorthernVoice - held at the University of British Columbia, and if you’re lucky enough to be attending, make sure you post about it on your site and to Flickr.
If you weren’t able to get a ticket for this year, there’s no shortage of sites providing information on the event.
- If you follow Twitter, make sure that you track #northernvoice
- Flickr junkies can check out the nv2008 and northernvoice tags
- Follow the Technorati tag for northernvoice
- Or, just turn to the old standby, Google (via Google Blog Search)
I haven’t included links to any local blogs, because I’m sure to not include someone who should be, so if you check the Technorati and GBS results, you’ll definitely come across some of the coverage by Vancouver’s excellent bloggers.
A Look at Firefox v3 Beta 3
I’m a long time supporter of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, based on it’s stability, customization, and the wide range of add-ons that can make the 
installation uniquely yours. When the version 3 betas (and even the alphas) came out, I wanted to jump in and give them a try, but each time I went away thinking that they needed to put some more work into it.
Admittedly there are big warnings all over the installation that tell you that it’s a development release, and really shouldn’t be used for a production environment. They’re right about that. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a better experience with Beta 3, although this one was probably my doing more than anything.
When I first installed it, I did everything that was recommended - create a unique profile to avoid torching your stable version, etc. And when I got it running, I was impressed. Things were a LOT better than they had been in the previous versions. And it was a lot faster, as well, although this may have been due to the fact that there were no extensions installed.
I played around with it for a few minutes, and was really considering putting it into use as the primary version on my work machine, and then I remembered that I’d seen on Lifehacker somewhere that you could make your extensions compatible with the version 3 beta. I should have left well enough alone, but that’s not what I like to do.
Essentially you go into Firefox’s configuration and tell it two things:
- If an extension is not compatible with this version, ignore that fact and run it anyway
- If an extension is a security risk, ignore that fact and run it anyway
Scary, huh? Now you know why it’s not recommended for a production machine (among other reasons). So I gave it a try and things seemed to be going all right, until I restarted the app after the extensions were installed.
And then it crashed on startup. And again. And again. Uh oh. I uninstalled and reinstalled the whole thing and tried again, but this time didn’t drop all of the extensions in at once. And it happened again. With the IE Tab extension, I believe.
Oh well, let’s go back to 2.0.11 and life can continue on. Uninstalled the beta and started up v2. And found that all of my settings had been removed again. This was not cool.
I keep all of my extensions stored on my local machine, and my bookmarks are in del.icio.us, but still. If I hadn’t had the stuff saved, I would have been screwed, big time. Part of the risk of dealing with beta software, I guess.
So, long and short of it is, if you want to give Firefox 3 Beta 3 a try, go ahead, but go in with your eyes open and know that there could be potential problems.
And be sure to let me know how you make out.
I’ll be waiting for the release version, thanks.
Applications Broken After Upgrading to Vista SP1
Microsoft has posted about a number of applications that are know to either break completely or have reduced functionality after a machine is upgrade to Service Pack 1 for Vista. Most of the applications are security-related in nature and can either be blocked from starting, do not launch at all or can have reduced functionality.
Of those listed, BitDefender AV, Zone Alarm Security Suite, and the New York Times Reader are likely to be the most commonly recognized applications.
To say this is a common thing just among Windows users would just be wrong, though. The current release of Apple’s OS X 10.5.2 points to a number of problems with apps getting borked after the upgrade.
So before you go jumping on Microsoft, please realize that they don’t write the apps that no longer work after applying the upgrade, and perhaps the companies that developed these apps should have confirmed that they worked under SP1 themselves.
But then, it’s Microsoft’s fault that HP didn’t write new drivers for your printer when you upgraded to Vista too, isn’t it? </sarcasm>
A New Design for rodtempleton.net
As you may be able to tell, I’ve decided that this site needs to be updated and completely redone, so I’m going to be taking a bit of time to get everything set up the way that I want it.
The theme is what I’m going with, but I’ll be working on the links and other stuff over the next few days, so I ask that you have a little patience, and we’ll get things back to running normally again.
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