This post is secretly a test of posting from the iPhone Wordpress app. As you were!

The author was called to a friend’s relative’s house to investigate the strange behaviour of their PC. As the author expected, it was stuffed full of spyware and other nastiness, but curiously, it was in an even worse condition than that. Key services, such as its USB capabilities, its sound device and even Norton Antivirus were disabled. The owner didn’t have the experience to screw up her computer so royally, so what had happened? Quote:

She had phoned a number out of the local paper of a PC ‘expert’ who could solve any problem. He had come round and fiddled with the PC for a while and ‘Run something where he got rid of a lot of ticks in boxes’ (msconfig) – a few reboots and he had told her that the PC was damaged beyond repair and she would need a new one. The one she had was a Dell that she paid £900 for a couple of years ago and he wasn’t even selling her one – he said ‘Get another Dell because this would have happened a lot sooner on a cheaper PC’.

The bill for his expert advice lasting less than an hour?

£175 + VAT.

What? Arrrggh. Not only was the cretin unable to fix the problem, he advised the owner that the only way to solve her spyware woes – for that is all they were, before he wrecked everything else – was to get a whole new PC.

As the owner fortunately knew, PCs are not damaged ‘beyond repair’ unless they are actually a smoking heap on your kitchen floor.

This story really annoys me for a couple of reasons. For one, I see self-styled ‘PC experts’ advertising in the local paper all the time. I’d never dream of becoming one – far too much hassle – but I imagine that the majority are hard-working individuals who know their way around Windows and have chosen an innovative way of making some cash. They, and indeed all PC geeks, don’t deserve to have their reputation stained by idiots who have no idea what’s going on.

Secondly, everyone knows someone who’s, shall we say, a computer novice. To be honest, they don’t know their Internet Explorer arse from their Task Manager elbow, and they probably don’t want to, either. The idea that someone is making money off their ignorance – especially when they’re completely useless – is annoying.

And that’s why I saw BT’s Home IT Advisor service advertised a few days ago and thought “what a good idea”. It’s £9.99 a month (and you can ask them as many trivial and irritating questions as you like), or £25 for a single incident. Spywared-up? Computer won’t boot because you’ve had some monkey playing with it for £175 an hour? Call BT, who you can – presumably – trust.

I’m surprised no large company has thought to offer it before. Yeah, so there’s only so much help you can offer over the phone, and I dread to think of the huge array of differing circumstances the phone advisors will have to cope with, but it’s a start. Until computers are clever enough to take care of themselves, it sounds like a great service for the computer newcomer.

Could be a bit cheaper though.

With part one of a two-part article on Windows user account types, no less. Anyone who’s ever tried to do the right thing and run Windows as a mere mortal user knows that the experience is painful in the extreme, owing to the blanket assumption by third-party developers that everyone runs as the all-powerful Administrator.

It says something that even Microsoft’s own employees run their workstations as administrators. There is talk of a change in policy when Vista surfaces, a move that’s likely to upset some within The Beast, but should give the rest of us a workable system. In theory, at least.

User privileges is something that Linux has got right all along. Access to files and other resources is fine-grained, with users able to restrict the ability to read, write, or execute their files (or folder, where ‘executing’ becomes ‘traversing’) based on user ID, group membership, or lack thereof. Thus you can allow everyone to reach your public_html folder without letting them see the contents of your home directory beneath it; or you can make things read-only; or you can let your fellow users execute one of your programs without being able to read the executable itself, if you feel like it.

To most newcomers to Linux, this sort of control – and the need to be logged in as the root (admin) user to perform most system maintenance tasks – is a completely alien concept, because they’re used to being the Administrator on their Windows system and able to do whatever they like. File permissions have existed in Windows since Windows NT, but for the average home user – even the average home user with Windows XP Professional – this feature is deactivated by default and confusing if you turn it on.

In theory, better ‘limited user’ accounts in Vista should encourage their uptake and make the Unix-style permissions and user paradigm familiar to more users. In practice? Everyone will still run as Administrator unless Microsoft stops them.

Still, get yourself over to Benny’s blog and read all about the pain of limited user accounts in Windows XP. And perhaps give it a go. It’ll make your online experience a little bit safer.

An Amiga on the Internet. Running the DS port of ScummVM. A Sinclair QL print server. An Xbox-based media centre. A rarely-updated blog with a backend written from scratch. Past projects, undertaken with minimal good reason, all.

And now, I’ve fallen for the ultimate geek affliction, the desire to run Linux in strange places. Thanks to the DS Linux project, it’s possible to surf the web, listen to stuttery MP3s, configure your wireless network connection and admittedly not do much else, all in the kind of user-friendly environment that only a command-line interface driven by an onscreen keyboard can provide.

Be still my beating heart!

Honestly, Linux DS is extremely impressive. Shoehorning the Linux kernel and a useful amount of the core functionality into the paltry 4MB of RAM available is a great achievement. But unlike ScummVM DS, it’s difficult to see the point of the project. Although I find it difficult to understand the desire geeky types have to attempt these difficult and ultimately doomed projects, my own track record indicates I know exactly what drives them. Tinkering is fun, no matter how pointless the end result. Sadly!

Yes, Google Maps is evidently designed for (and by) fat pies who refuse to step out of their SUVs until they’re inches away from their destination – Americans. Quite possibly Americans like the young couple who once told me in hushed tones, on a train but without a hint of irony, that public transport in California “isn’t for people like us“.

Despite the fact that Google Maps diligently records all known nasty one-way systems, and routes its directions accordingly – with no way of telling it to stop it because you’re on foot – it somehow omits that most basic of locations, the humble train station. No, you can’t find train stations on Google Maps, either by looking or by specifically searching. Instead, for unfamiliar towns and cities, you either have to trust that most major train stations can generally be found on “Station Road” or perhaps “Station Approach”, or look up their location somewhere else and make a mental note.

This is rendered even more bizarre by the fact that Google Maps actually include railway lines, albeit represented in the same way as the rather less uncrossable tram lines, leaving the location of the stations themselves as the only mystery.

All this, of course, means little more than the opportunity to put my limited artistic skills to good use when I have to print a map, or send one to someone else. Trying to remember where stations are when sending directions to friends probably helps keep my brain active, too! In the end, in a twisted kind of way, Google Maps are doing me a favour. Probably.

It didn’t need to be anything special. The DS only supports the older WEP encryption standard, and – being a paranoid bastard who thinks the TV is watching me – I wouldn’t use wireless networking for anything important no matter how secure it was supposed to be. So all things considered, this heap should have suited my needs perfectly, allowing me to connect my DS while blocking everything else out.

Ebuyer sent me a DVD writer instead. Bad start to my quest, wasn’t it? I sent it back to Ebuyer, who promptly told me that they don’t actually sell what I’d ordered, refunded only part of what I’d paid, and stopped talking.

So now I’m up to ordering this thing from Novatech’s special “so cheap it must be a mistake” range. We’ll see what I get this time. I am expecting a purple elephant.

Aside from that, I still insist that Plusnet are pretty good.

This time they’ve decided to up the ante with an unstoppable act of wanton destruction. Unbeknownst to me, since I couldn’t even CONNECT, the following ominous message appeared on the Service Status page on Sunday morning:
“Our network engineers are currently investigating an issue where customers are not seeing any email displayed in their mailboxes.”

Do you know why customers were not seeing any mail displayed in their mailboxes, readers?

It’s all GONE.

Yes, this evening I’ve had a quick trawl through the updates on the Service Status page. Cluelessness gradually turned to suspicious caginess which, by this evening became “oh shit guys, hope you’re sitting down: 700GB of email gone :o :(”. The story goes that some hapless employee accidentally typed a mythical “delete everything” command while mistakenly logged in to the wrong servers. The mirrored backup system did its work and dutifully replicated the change, so the backups are toast as well.

Oh dear Plusnet, oh dear. They’re sending the data to a data recovery firm, who should – since the disks were yanked out of the system, probably in a blind panic, immediately after everything was bummed – be able to recover everything.

700GB of data to be recovered, though? More like the biggest bill you’ve ever seen.

It’s bloody stupid, that’s what they say. And, by and large, unless you find yourself stuck on a desert island with only a sledgehammer for company, with a self-inflating liferaft tucked safely away inside an enormous peanut, they’d be right.

Having heard about the wonders of XML from all sides for months – hell, I’d even sampled the delights of XML in C#, where retrieving data is pretty much a one-line chunk of code thanks to the devilry hidden within System.XML – I thought I’d use it to store the runtime settings for my C++ application.

More fool me for spending HALF AN OOOUR trying to wrap my head around the various XML libraries out there. Half an hour? More like two days. They’re vast, overcomplicated and completely ill-suited to doing anything less complex than running a nuclear reactor while juggling XSLT transformations with your eye stalks.

You’re also expected to extend them with reams of your own code before you can even begin to play with them.

Fortunately, before I went completely insane, I had a look around for an alternative. And I found a great one. A C++ class that reads data from a humble .ini file? Invoked with a single line of code?

Exactly what someone should have written for XML.

It makes a distinction between objects declared locally and objects declared on the heap. Local objects disappear, Java-style, as soon as they go out of scope. All well and good. For every object you declare on the heap, you get a pointer back. You must keep track of these – if you lose them, the objects they point to aren’t gone; they hang around, clogging up vital memory. You just can’t access them any more.

There’s a document entitled “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot”, which serves as an amusing comparison of various programming languages. The entry for C++ says:

You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can’t tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying “That’s me, over there.”

Sounds about right to me. You see, multiple pointers – even multiple pointers passed between multiple objects – can quite happily point to the same object, which makes for extra headaches when it comes to deletion time.

Delete the object from the ‘wrong’ pointer? All the other pointers are now pointing to invalid areas of memory, and your program crashes when it tries to dereference them. Forget to delete the object at all? Your program sucks up more RAM than OpenOffice on a spreadsheet binge, and the only way to free it is to restart your program.

But the worst thing about pointers is how useful they can be, or so I’m told. No more creating copies of objects to pass around, even if it does happen automatically – so inefficient, pfft! – you can just refer to the exact same thing from multiple places!

It’s just a shame it gets incredibly confusing fast.

What about MPEG2 decoding? There’s a lot of it goes on, you know. Who’d notice if you snuck some kind of distributed computing application into their Sky Digibox?

Just a thought.