Book Store
I’m not big on the viral email images that go around, but this one is pretty funny. It was emailed to me, so I can’t take any credit for it (and it seems to be all over the web).
If you can't find the book you want you're probably shopping
at the ...................
The sneaky trick to sell me anti-virus software
So, this morning I get called downstairs because the kid’s computer is filled with viruses. I’ve heard this before, so I wasn’t panicked. We have up-to-date virus definitions and the kids know to be careful about what they download or sites they visit, so unless it is a threat that is really new, it should be okay. I accept that it is still possible to get a virus on one of our pcs, but we try to be pretty vigilant.
But, when I looked at the computer, I nearly panicked. Here’s what it looked like:
It filled the entire window. My first impulse was to shut he pc down as quickly as possible in case it spread (I realise this may not be the most techie response). The red “7 Viruses found” label was blinking. How can you ignore the blinking text?
Then I looked closer. I realised it was a web page disguised to look like Windows Explorer. Our pc has more than one drive and the image only had a c drive. I saw the URL in the browser address bar. If I tried to right click on the image to view the source, it tried to download an executable. When I viewed the page source using the menu items, the entire page was dynamically written with javascript. It’s scary to think that things like this are out there. I was able to figure out that it was just a browser popup with an animated image, but not everyone would be able to see it so quickly.
I showed the kids why it was fake and how to spot it if it happened again. Someone had downloaded the exe before I got there, but the real Anti-virus picked it up and removed it.
I suspect that it would install a new anti-virus on your pc and then tell you it expired so you could renew it. I’m not sure how it works or if there is a legit company behind it, but it is very sneaky and under-handed.
Spotify online music service is pretty good
I like to listen to music while coding. I always have. Sometimes I’ve worked at jobs where they allow this (media companies like BBC never mind developers with headphones) and some that don’t (investment banks never allow this). So it’s nice when I get to do some coding at home on my own pc with my own set-up (Visual Studio 2008, twin monitors, etc) and my own music. So when I’m at the desktop PC, I usually have iTunes open in another window.
So I have a pretty big music collection—not tied to a specific genre. I’m hardly a connoisseur of music and would be out of place in any conversation about music, but I know what I like.
Yesterday I heard about Spotify from a friend who raved about it. I downloaded the app and gave it a try. I think I found my new background-music application for writing code.
Spotify is a desktop application which streams music to the desktop. You can chose any song they have in their library (I have found most that I’ve looked for) and listen to whole albums, etc. When I heard about it, I thought is sounded a lot like Last.fm, which is an okay personalised-radio station service application. But Spotify seems to have no lag or buffering. It seems to download the tracks as needed in one go, without streaming. Not sure how the technology works underneath, but by watching the network usage on task manager, I see the network usage spikes only when a new track starts to play.
My only concerned with listening to music on the internet is that Orange broadband is already complaining about how much bandwidth I’m using in the evenings (since I spend a lot of time watching mlb.com, iplayer, and youtube videos).
I’ve found some articles online that refer to Spotify as an iTunes-killer. I hardly think that’s the case. If I was tied to this desk and never listened to music on my iPod in the car or while running, that would be the case, but you don’t keep the music, you just listen. You can listen to albums or tracks and set up playlists.
Spotify is also being referred to as a legal alternative to piracy. I can see that.
I’ve only started using it a few days ago, but am very pleased with it. I’m using the free account (ad-supported), but they have pro accounts for £10 a month. There are some adds inserted between the tracks, but I’ve listed by about 5 hours now and have only heard one.
It’s a nice service available in the UK now if you have a chance to take it out.
Fast Food while Dairy Intolerant
Some members of my family are dairy intolerant. This is usually fine when cooking at home (there are plenty of substitutes for milk products), but very difficult when going out. During the Summer, I take my kids out on day trips around England and it is not always possible to prepare food in advance. And, I love the junk food. So, we'll go to a fast food place.
The problem with dairy intolerance is that so many foods have milk (lactose, whey, or just "milk proteins") in their ingredients. Common sense doesn't work when trying identify what has milk in it. Most types of hot dogs, for example, include milk protein (but not all of them). The tomato sauce on Pizza Hut pizzas include milk. The BBQ ribs at TGI Fridays contain milk. It has taken me a while to learn what to look out for.
If you have children that have (or you yourself has) an intolerance or allergy, you know how difficult this can be. Last week, for instance, I stopped into a Subway and asked the store manager if their rib sandwich contained any dairy products. He looked annoyed and told me that he had to read the ingredients on the box back in the freezer. I asked him if he could do that. He disappeared for a minute and returned with a giant white box which he read the side of. "No, no milk," he said. But I couldn't be sure if he was looking for the term "lactose" or "whey" or anything else which might include it.
Most fast-food chains make nutritional literature available online (although never usually available in the store). I've printed out the documents for all the major chains which exists in the UK and pasted them all together. I've found that printing all of the documents out (two pages to a sheet--double sided) and highlighting all the milk products makes going out for fast food a bit easier. It's easy to keep this print-out in the car so we have it if we need it.
Here is a set of links of the big chains ingredient documents. These are all American chains, but the links are to the UK sites (not sure if they vary in the UK). If you have children with food intolerance, I hope you find this useful.
McDonalds
http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/static/pdf/food/OurFood-Booklet.pdf (pages 8-27 have ingredients listed)
Burger King
http://www.burgerking.co.uk/files/documents/ingredients.pdf
KFC
http://www.kfc.com/nutrition/pdf/kfc_allergens_april09.pdf
Pizza Hut
http://www.pizzahut.co.uk/media/77466/ingredients_list_starters_&_sides-0609.pdf
Dominos
http://www.takeafreshlook.co.uk/downloads/PizzaBasesToppingsIngredients.pdf
Leave it on or shut it down?
I turn my desktop computer (running XP) off every day when I'm not using it. It is a pain to wait for startup and shutdown times, but I'm concerned for the environment and all that.
I think most people leave it running 24 hours. I can understand why. Sometimes it take over 10 minutes to really get all services loaded. I've tried hibernate, but the Dell 9150 I use comes back from Hibernate with the fan running at full speed and it's very noisy. Windows seems to be geared for 24 operation-- with automated processes kicking off at different times of the day. It's like the fridge-- but I'm not sure how it compares in terms of energy consumption.
I've actually set my bios to kick on at 4am so the computer has finished start-up before I get up there ten minutes later. It does all my site backups at a specific time.
I'm trying to find more energy efficient uses of the pc. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to know.
Attention: Low Crime Area
I've been seeing signs all over the place lately by Thames Valley Police which say "This is a Low Crime Area. Help us keep it that way." On the other side of the sign it tells you to lock stuff in your car and take valuables with you etc.
It strikes me as funny because very rarely are you told that you don't need to be vigilant. The sign in the picture was posted in a park. I walked into the park with my usual level of caution (don't talk to strangers, etc), but then saw the sign and realised I could take my wallet out and start counting my money right there on the street. There are no signs like this posted outside the park, so I assume this must be some kind of sanctuary against crime! Once I leave the park, I need to be careful again.
I wonder how much this sign campaign cost. I'll bet it is a ridiculous amount-- in the tens of thousands of pounds county-wide. I wonder how much crime it actually stops. Someone must have said "Let's put signs up everywhere where there is little crime, just in case." How will they know it works? If it is still a low crime area six months from now, does that mean the sign campaign was successful?
Or . . . is it merely a CV point for an public official to say they are "doing something about crime"?
This sign is posted in Oxfordshire in England, but you get the same kind of stuff in the States.
Growing up in San Diego, there were always public service signs and posters up everywhere--most of the time, no one paid any attention to them. In school, the hallway walls were plastered with posters of Rob Lowe and Brooke Shields that had giant slogans telling you to stay away from drugs, smoking, sex, etc. No one ever stopped to look at these posters-- they were always just there. Someone somewhere spent a ton of taxpayer money to produce them, but no one cared.
California is broke. Republicans in the state refuse to raise taxes any further and the voters agreed with them in a recent election. I think these kinds of ineffective programs are the reason why. While the Democrats want to make out that Republicans are against paying teachers and firemen, the reality is that Republicans are against wasteful spending more than anything else.
Sure, putting up signs everywhere to reduce crime sounds like a good idea--but it also sounds like an expensive idea. The problem is there is no way to measure how effective they are. Our governments are so far in debt, that these kind of luxuries need to be looked at.
I didn't mean for this post to be a rant-- just a picture of a funny sign. I'll try to post a picture of this sign in a few weeks-- after it has been vandalised.
Time to Drop Audible.co.uk
For the last couple of years, I've subscribed to Audible for my audio books. For £7.99 a month, I get one audio book a month. I've got loads now.
I frequently listen to audio books when I have downtime or doing something mundane like garden work or dishes. Audible delivers the books in audio book format instead of MP3, so I don't lose where I am in the book when I stop it and don't have to go to a specific track when I pick it up again.
In the past couple of years, I've had a few problems with the service. They use a pretty strict DRM, and I've had trouble each time I've re-installed an OS or moved to my laptop. One month, I didn't use my book credit and found that it was removed the following month. Their customer service resolved this for me but told me I have to use the credits or lose them. That's fine.
They seem to be doing well. Every UK magazine I look at these days has an add for "Free Audio Book" to get people in. It's not a bad service and I would recommend getting the free book.
But I've come to realise lately, that all the Audible books are on iTunes. Even some books that are produced by Audible in the US are available in iTunes and not the UK Audible website. Here's the big thing-- the audio books are cheaper in iTunes. Every book I've compared seems to be 2 or 3 quid cheaper if you bought them when you needed to. Besides, on Audible, I find that all the books I want to listen to lately cost less than £7.99-- so it would be better to stop paying the subscription. This wasn't the case a year ago.
Audible is a good service, but I think it needs to compete better with the same books it sells through iTunes. If you are looking to join Audible.co.uk, join for the free book, then buy them when you need to through iTunes (that is, if you are tied to Apple because of your iPod or iPhone).
Criminal Spying of US Citizens
A very interesting news story yesterday on NBC news about the domestic spying on US Citizens without a warrant. This story somehow ended up in the last few minutes of the broadcast:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
"Prosecutions are unlikely". This is one of my biggest problems with the last administration. Since you aren't doing anything wrong, the argument goes, you don't have anything to worry about.
I wonder if any of my phone calls have been listened to.
Reagan said in his inauguration speech in 1981, "We are a people with a government. Not the other way around." Why are we always made to feel like subjects instead of citizens.
End of the U.S.
For the past few weeks, I can't help thinking about an article I read about the end of the USA. The Wall Street Journal had a story about Igor Pangarin, a Russian analyst who has been predicting the economic fall and separation of the United States for the past ten years.
Now that things are falling apart the way they are, people are taking more notice of him.
You can see the article here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html
This article has been weighing on my mind through the inauguration, the news of 
layoffs-- everything. Pangarin is an analyst, not a psychic-- so his predictions are not based on magic. There have been other stranger predictions (someone told me about John Titor a few years ago, but I don't put much stake in that), but this, according to WSJ, seems more credible.
Read the article. It's spooky.
Is it just a bunch or rubbish? Probably. I mean, it has to be, right?
The Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.
Amazon MP3 Downloader
I bought the new Snow Patrol album the other night.
Usually, when I buy music, I use iTunes because it it so easy and they really execute it well. I can buy a track on my iPhone from where ever I am, as long as I'm on a wifi connection. But, then I get the DRM and the headaches that brings along (I can't put it on a non-IPOD MP3 player, for example, so one of my kids can listen to it).
But this time, I didn't bother with iTunes and tried out Amazon's new MP3 service. Although it's not as convenient as iTunes and I had to boot up the ol' computer to use it, it allowed me to download the tracks as MP3 format--completely DRM free. It added the tracks (with all the right ID3 tags, etc) straight into iTunes and Windows Media Player. I paid for the music like an adult and they treated me like an adult.
To use Amazon's MP3 service, you just add the album to your shopping basket like everything else, and then download an MP3 downloader program which is a little window that does nothing but lists the tracks it's downloading.
The process is very smooth. I am also able to listen to the tracks on my Ubuntu laptop without any fuss.
I mentioned how nice this service is to someone the other day (well, more than just one someone) and was asked, "You actually paid for the music?"
Yes. Yes I did. It cost me only around £6.50 (but older albums are £3), and I can listen to it completely guilt-free.
Anyway, if you buy music, give the Amazon service a try. It's nice to see some decent competition out there for iTunes.
About Eric Wroolie
Eric Wroolie is a software developer specialising in project Outsourcing and Offshoring.
As a software developer since 1998, he has built applications for Barclays Capital, BBC, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Omega Logic.
In 2004, he founded Overpass, a company that provides offshoring services to UK and US organisations.
He is a San Diego native who has spent the last 10 years living in England and working in London.
Eric speaks Chinese Mandarin and served in the US Army as a Mandarin and Vietnamese linguist.
In addition to being able to speak Mandarin, Eric can juggle three balls for almost twenty seconds, and make fart noises using his hands only (this is more difficult than it sounds-- try it).
Eric has an MCSD in Visual Basic 6 and previous languages, but now works with .Net. He holds ScrumMaster Certification with Scrum Alliance.
Eric on Twitter
- Slept in until 6:30. Went back to bed after ten minutes when I got up at 4. I'm being hit by mid-week fatigue. 14 hrs ago
- @jiffer I thought the Power of Less was alright, but not fantastic. If you've never read GTD (and who hasn't read that!), it's fine. Okay. in reply to jiffer 2 days ago
- @AlexBowman I was with you until you got to "sushi role" in reply to AlexBowman 2 days ago
- 3 mile run this morning. Also did a couple of hours work for a client. Baseball season is only a month away! 2 days ago
- Finished reading Linchpin by Seth Godin. Really enjoyed the book. Now I'm on "Power of Less" by Leo Babauta. 1 week ago
- More updates...
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